Life at 3 miles an Hour

In recent weeks I've been blessed with a  challenging personal question, followed a few weeks later by an opportunity for some rest and reflection, where the question kept struggling to the surface.  The question in this instance was what I considered to be my greatest weakness as a practitioner of the pastoral arts.  The way it usually works is that a burning personal question appears in one form or another, followed by some brief attention and then a dive deep back into the next thing, resulting in not only forgetting the response, but eventually also the original question.  Ironic because my answer to this particular question was my difficulty in slowing down, backing off, and resting. For twenty four years I've lived and breathed "church".  Although there are some in the world convinced that I only work 30 minutes a week during my preaching and teaching opportunities, multiplied where multiple weekend services are involved and an occasional wedding or funer...

In my earliest years I never gave it much thought.  I guess that I kind of had a "the world is flat" opinion that never really prompted a consideration for what lie to the West, beyond "the Great river" that split our country.  Sure I read the text books, saw the movies, studied American geography, played "Oregon Trail".  It wasn't until we made our cross country drive 16 years ago to take up residency on the West Coast that this nagging question "Why?" began to dominate my thoughts on travels back and forth on highways birthed from the wagon trails of old. Every time I find myself heading back to the West on these same highways, I imagine life before these asphalt trails  and the unimaginable effort it took to navigate this treacherous and desolate terrain.  I attempt to imagine the unimaginable and it always leads to "Why?" in so many contexts.  Why would you leave the relative comfort of what you knew?  Why risk for something ...

Well the wedding is over, but the marriage has just begun…day 2. It’s gotten off to a good start anyway. I mean, how hard could it be? They’re spending a week in Disneyworld. I guess that you might be able to argue about which monorail car to sit in or how many times to ride Space Mountain. I don’t think that they will. My prayer for the newlyweds is that they’ll get to spend this week on nothing but imagination and fun, before coming back to the sobering reality of jobs, rent, school, groceries and all that they rest of us wrestle with. It was a beautiful ceremony. I mean really….how many times have you heard about bad ones? Especially if you are intimately connected to it. I would guess that it would be about as many times as you’ve heard a new parent admit that their child is rather alien like, or about as many times as you’ve heard some real honesty at the funeral of someone who had lived a rather abrasive existence. I’ll tell you that it was a beautiful ceremony and a ...