Presby-Musings

The Truth must dazzle gradually,  Or every man be blind--           - Emily Dickinson  I experienced an odd feeling today--one that I've had before, but have never really reflected on all that much at the time.  Today was different.    I was sitting with my oldest and youngest son in a cafe while we were waiting for our lunch to arrive, and I had the strangest sense of the passing of time and the importance of the moment.   My oldest boy is getting married in September, and presumably moving on to launch a new life with his new bride.  I wondered how many moments like that I would have--sitting at a table with my boys at this age, in this season of life.   I decided that those moments could be counted on one hand.  I felt a strange sense of the importance of that realization.  It felt like the kind of wisdom that only comes when we are open and vulnerable and knowing that life is short, pre...

There was this song we used to sing in the churches of my youth entitled "This World Is Not My Home." The lyrics went something like this:  This world is not my home I'm just a passing through My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue The angels beckon me from heaven's open door And I can't feel at home in this world anymore. When I was a kid, I sang this song with gusto along with all of the saints who gathered for Sunday worship.  We believed those words, too.  They weren't trite phrases that tripped of our tongues.  We believed that "this world" wasn't our home.  Our home was some imagined glory where people just like us went when they died.  And because "this world" was so awful, we were supposed to say that we couldn't wait until we got to that "home" somewhere "beyond the blue."   In light of the recent and very public suicides of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion icon Kate Spad...

"Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame.  I asked for wonder, and He gave it to me." - Abraham Joshua Heschel  Yesterday I dropped off my seven-year-old son Jacob at camp.  It's his first sleepaway camp experience--just a half a week this time.   To say that he was excited about the prospect of going to camp was perhaps the understatement of all understatements.  He filled the car with chatter about what he was hoping.   "Do you think I'll make some friends at camp?  I would really like to make some friends."  "Will we go swimming in the river?  I hope we can.  How do you swim in a river?" "I hope I get to use my sleeping bag on a campout.  That would be cool."  When we arrived at his cabin and were setting up his bunk, he climbed up and down it like a monkey, exclaiming how awesome it was.  One of the kids in the cabin mentioned that he had brought his Bible....

I have a confession I'd like to make in today's Daily Devo: I have a hard time asking for help.   At some point in my life I fully embraced the old adage that "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."   Recently, I've been spending a lot of time studying the Enneagram--a system of understanding the human psyche that can be traced back to the 4th century.   I'm a "3" in the Enneagram, which means that my resistance to asking for help is pretty high.   The truth is, in the case of Enneagram "3s" that old adage should  be " If you want something done the way that you want it done , you will most likely do it yourself, especially  if you don't want to appear like you're not capable . " When it comes to matters of faith, however, what is true for the "3" is also true for so many of us.   We have been told that in order to be a Jesus-follower we need to "get right with God,...