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Jesus Is Risen, Now What?

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As I write this, it is the Monday after Easter.  I've drunk about four cups of coffee, and none of them seem to have taken.  I'm groggy, tired, wrung out and generally feeling kind of less than my best. 

I am having to resist the urge to go somewhere and eat pancakes... lots of pancakes. 

For those of us who serve as pastors or church staffers, the Monday after Easter is a tough day.  All of the effort, planning and the energy that was spent preparing and then facilitating Easter worship services ends abruptly and then you start realizing how tired you are. 

I got to thinking today about Jesus' disciples and how they must have felt on the Monday after Easter.  I imagine that they were all pretty stunned and exhausted from all that happened that weekend.

The Gospel accounts don't really give us a timeline to the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus to his followers.  But I think that the Monday after Easter was a day when the disciples sat around groggy, tired, wrung out …
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Post Easter Breakfast Reflections

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I wrote this devo a couple of years ago, but I thought it was an appropriate reprint for the Monday after Easter... 

I'm not much of a cook, but, since I am passable at making breakfast, I sometimes prepare it for the family in the morning.  It's nothing fancy, mind you, just bacon or sausage and eggs, waffles or pancakes for my youngest son (the frozen kind), and generally a second cup of coffee for myself and my wife.  

It makes me happy to do this.  My wife Merideth tells me that the feeling I get is often what she experiences when she prepares meals for "her boys."  Merideth is actually a really good cook, and she truly enjoys it.  So, it makes it even more special to me that she relinquishes something she loves to do, in order for me to experience some of the same joy she feels.     

One day she and I were talking about the scene from John's Gospel where the risen Jesus appears to his disciples by the Sea of Galilee while they are out fishing.  When they finall…
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Easter 2019 - "Let Us Not Mock God With Metaphor"

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This is it folks.  The Day of Days.  The Moment we've been waiting for... 

We dressed up and came ready to party, am I right?  I mean I feel that way, don't you? It's Easter Sunday, people, and I'm wearing my bow tie.

In our Presbyterian tradition, we get all giddy with our liturgy even in the worship services where we don't do all the formal things.  And so that's why when I say, JESUS IS RISEN, you will respond by saying HE IS RISEN INDEED!

Visitors be like...  Man, these Presbys are flat crazy.  Why yes... yes we are. 

Just so we're clear... just so we're clear... We are celebrating the impossible.  That's why we get all crazy.  We are celebrating the impossible.  Because it's impossible that someone would die, be buried for three days and then rise again.  Impossible.

And that's the Big Question for so many people---including some of us who just lost our minds shouting.  "The Resurrection really happened right?" 

Or we could pose the…
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Never Lose Hope

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All week long I have been sharing prayers from a prayer book I've been using throughout the season of Lent.  But today, since it's Good Friday, I decided to write my own prayer. 

Good Friday is part of what is known as the Triduum---the three holiest days of Holy Week:  Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.  It is the day we commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus which happened "between noon and three" in the afternoon on the Jewish Sabbath, which is Friday. 

So today I thought I would share some thoughts about the loss of hope, and this particular prayer came to me this morning:

May I discover the peace that comes from never losing hope even when all seems lost.  

I was reading something that the renowned lecturer and author Joan Chittister wrote in her book The Way of The Cross:  
Sometimes things don't have a happy ending in life.  They just grind on until loss becomes the new normal.  It's true.  There are times in our lives when we fail.  We fall flat…
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Giving Yourself A Break & Some Grace

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Throughout Holy Week I'll be sharing some prayers from a book I've been using as a prayer guide through Lent: Prayer: Forty Days of Practice.  I hope that these prayers and the reflections that accompany them will be meaningful to you as we journey with Jesus through Holy Week.  

Prayer for Thursday of Holy Week: 

May I have hope for myself the way I do for others. 

The prayer for today prompted me to reflect on the number of personality assessment courses that I've taken over the years.  Spoiler alert:  I've taken a lot of them, but here's the skinny on where you'll find me on some of them:

I'm an ENFP on the Meyers-Briggs assessment.  I'm a "D" on DISC.  I identify as a "3" on the Enneagram.  My number one Signature Theme on Strengths Finder is "Achiever." 

You don't have to know a lot about these kinds of assessments to understand that I'm probably pretty hard on myself when it comes to performance, results, and achie…
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Notre Dame, Hope & Resurrection

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Throughout Holy Week I'll be sharing some prayers from a book I've been using as a prayer guide through Lent: Prayer: Forty Days of Practice.  I hope that these prayers and the reflections that accompany them will be meaningful to you as we journey with Jesus through Holy Week.  

Prayer for Wednesday of Holy Week: 

May I never grow tired of starting over or helping others do the same.  My hope is always in renewal and resurrection.

 Two days ago, much of the world watched in horror and dismay as a fire raged in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.  Firefighters were able to save as much of the iconic structure as they could, but the damage was devastating. 

Like so many of my friends who have had the fortune of visiting Paris and touring Notre Dame, I had my own memories to draw upon as I watched the story unfold yesterday.  I've shared some of those memories before in a devotion: 

In 2007, while on an epic trip to London and Paris for our anniversary, Merideth and I found ourselves …
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Seeing Yourself In Others

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Throughout Holy Week I'll be sharing some prayers from a book I've been using as a prayer guide through Lent: Prayer: Forty Days of Practice.  I hope that these prayers and the reflections that accompany them will be meaningful to you as we journey with Jesus through Holy Week.  

Prayer for Tuesday of Holy Week: 

May my awareness of faults in myself or others never open the door to spite but grant me a deep appreciation for grace. 


Like the prayer from yesterday, this prayer has a two-fold focus for the one praying: Self & Others. 

If we would enter fully into the power of this prayer, we would first need to recognize that our own faults are intimately connected to the faults we perceive in others. 

A very kind and wise spiritual guide once taught me to repeat this phrase whenever I began to explore the faults I saw in other people--the kind of faults that cut me to the core, angered me beyond belief, or otherwise got my goat. 

My spiritual mentor would say, "What I see in …
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