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Showing posts from October, 2024

i couldn't, though i'm beginning to

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& somehow, i see / it's free A sermon for the confirmation of Chase & Jack: Chase , Jack, dear brothers in Christ, welcome to the faith ! Did that sound odd ? I bet it did. I bet it did, but I want you to know I meant it. And, what’s more , the peculiarity of that sentence is no accident, either. Herein lies your first lesson today: Faith is not intuitive. On the contrary , faith is counterintuitive . The more strange , the closer you are to that blessed and mysterious beating heart of faith. With any luck, you’ll find yourself saying, “How odd of God” many times.   With that, we’ve come upon our second lesson for today: Faith is not a program. And faith is not a formula, either. Faith is not a way to hide from life. And neither is faith a guide to make the confusing twists and turns of reality fit into a predetermined mold.   No, faith doesn’t tell you what lies ahead . Truth be told, real faith really wants nothing to do with that kind of chicanery . No, fa...

what if i told you they're all lying

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& i love you for who you are right now the best A sermon on that time we almost threw it away for papier-mâché “I’ve been blessed ,” he said.   I knew I heard him. But then again, I needed to double-check , just to be sure. For one thing, we, sadly, don’t speak this way anymore. Do we? For another, I let myself in, and he was napping . Perhaps I started him. Or maybe he was speaking in response to something in a dream .   But no, I had heard him right . Honestly, though, what he said was unexpected, given the circumstances . That’s why I let myself in. I don’t schedule visits. I just drop by. But typically , I knock first. Not this time, though. I let myself in because Bambi , Tim’s wife of nearly fifty years, had recently died .   The death was so fresh that the hospital bed Bambi had mostly been confined to for years was still sitting against the East side of the living room wall. And it wasn’t just that Bambi had recently died, either. It was that the Alzh...