I’m writing this during the pandemic of 2020. There are plenty of predictions about what is going to happen, but you readers will have a much better perspective on all of...

“We’ve never done it that way.” It’s a threat, or so it feels to many church leaders. Or it’s a warning or an incantation against change of any sort. Some have...

I remember that day more than forty-two years ago when I stood before God and everybody and made promises that were impossible to keep. Oh, I didn’t think so at the...

Waiting is always hard. You can smell those cookies baking. You watch the clock hands move. And it seems interminable. So you try to hurry it along. You open the oven...

Every day I will bless the Lord. Every day? Yes, every day. What about the days I regret, the days when everything goes wrong, when I make bad choices or fall...

For all the range of emotion that permeates the Psalms, the collection ends in a crescendo of praise. In this next to last song, there is unbridled exuberance, ranging from raucous...

It was a loud party day, a celebration of what God had done for God’s people, marked by movement and music and food and joy. On that day the Lord spoke...

An old Christian adage says that every Christian needs to experience three conversions—a conversion of the heart, the head, and finally the pocketbook. Zacchaeus has all three. He slips out of...

Zacchaeus isn’t a billionaire, just wealthier than the average person. While his name means “clean” or “innocent,” he has come about his money in suspicious ways. As the chief tax collector,...

As my preschool-aged daughter helped me color a sign for a protest against racial injustice, we talked about how people have been marching, resisting, and protesting for decades before us. Since...