Presby-Musings

Yesterday I wrote about silences, and the rhythms they create in the song that is being sung over us by God.  I felt like I had stumbled upon an important and life-giving truth.   And then today the majority of my devotional and Scripture readings, the music I'm listening to, the poems I've read... they all speak of God's presence, and the depth of meaning behind God's silence.  I suppose you could call it a coincidence, but I'm going to choose not to dishonor the beauty of this feeling by relegating it to the realms of chance.   Instead, I prefer to think of it as God's sly and loving way of telling me I am  known.   I also prefer to see this a grace-filled invitation for me to embrace my uncertainty with confidence--the kind of confidence that comes when I surrender all my outcomes to the One who is the center of all things.  Bob Goff writes,  "What a shame it would be if we were waiting for God to  say ...

Today I recalled something I heard a couple of years ago about the busy times when you're parenting (or grand-parenting) and hustling through life.  It went something like this:  "The days are long, but the years are short."   That's one of the truest things I've ever heard, and some days it's truer than truest.  Right now Merideth and I are in the midst of the blur of moving three times in just under a year, kids' school and social activities, work and everything else in life.   We have gone from one big decision to another more times than I can count this past year.  It's easy to look back and wonder where the time went, how we got here, and to focus only on those big moments, the huge things that marked our time.  But sometimes we can miss out on the glory of God, the beauty of God's will and the joy and peace that comes from simply being fully present in the every day moments, the ordinary times---when we practice being still and know...

I've spent a lot of time in the past several months trying to figure out God.  I struggled to understand what God was doing, where God might be leading, and whether to interpret the things I was feeling and experiencing as signs from God or just my own desires or wishes.   Over those months I pored over the Bible, sought inspiration from a variety of Christian authors, poets and songwriters.  I asked for advice from friends--hoping they would help me figure out God in my context even if they couldn't figure God out in their own.  And then I remembered something that I witnessed many years ago, while on a mission trip in Mexico.   One of the older teenage girls, who had been on multiple mission trips to the same site with us, came to me with a lament.  She launched into a long, convoluted diatribe about how she just wasn't "feeling it" on that particular trip.  She told me that she just wasn't feeling God "this time," and she'd been count...

There was a fatal car accident in our town over the weekend.  A lady and her nine year-old grand daughter were sitting at a stop light when a car driving the opposite direction, lost control and struck them.  The grandmother was killed instantly, and the little girl died later in the hospital.   My wife texted me this morning with these words.  "[She was] just sitting there minding her own business... That quick one of us could be gone."   I've been thinking about her words all morning, and about a conversation I had with one of our church's elders yesterday.  "Where is God when bad things happen?"   I've written about this pretty extensively over the past year, but it bears repeating that I believe God is in the midst of our suffering, with us in the moments of pain, tragedy and heartache--just as I believe God is with us in our moments of triumph, joy, happiness and success.   In Isaiah 57:15, the prophet speaks the words of God to Go...

Some years ago, I had someone ask me if I thought their family was cursed.  They related to me a litany of horrible things that had happened to family members over the course of the previous year.  It was one awful thing after another.   My instinct was to tell them, "It sure seems like it."  There was no good explanation for why so many bad things had come their way.  But I sure understood their need to find a reason for them--to discover some kind of meaning in their suffering.  I simply told them that sometimes things happened--it didn't have to do with a curse.   I remember reading something about this in Philip Yancey's great book entitled "Where is God When It Hurts?" Yancey addressed the way that so many of us seek answers from the Scripture to help us understand why we are suffering, but we don't always get the answers we're looking for.   Yancey wrote, "The Bible consistently changes the questions we bring to the problem of pai...

The winds howled outside and the rain pelted our house in waves last night as Hurricane Matthew made it's way up the Florida coast.  We awoke with the dull grey light of dawn revealing, trees that were bending and flailing in the diminishing gusts, debris around our neighborhood, but not much else.  We never lost power.  Nothing crashed into our house.  I even left a bench outside by mistake, and it never got knocked over.  I know that's not the case on the coast of Florida, and there's still more storm to come, but still...   When you look at the photos of the devastation in Haiti, and even the few photos that have come out of Cuba, it's sobering.   It makes you wonder, doesn't it?  Why does the same storm barely make a dent in one culture, but devastates another.  I get that there are massive economic, infrastructural and preparedness disparities between Haiti and the United States, to be sure.   I also get that these dispariti...

Today we are going to continue the sermon series that we started last week, a sermon series that is going to take us all the way through the month of August. The title of our sermon series is #struggle: Following Jesus in a Selfie-Centered world.  The basic overriding idea that will be moving us forward through this series is a simple one:  technology and social media are shaping our culture in ways that are often less than life-giving. Christians need to learn how to live faithfully and fully for Jesus within a culture that is--as we described it--"selfie-centered."   So last week we talked about how technology and social media have influenced our culture's ideas about contentment.  Today we're going to be talking about relationships.   One of the many things that I love about the technology that we use to communicate with is the immediacy that it offers us.  Back in high school when I wanted to talk to my wife when we were dating, I had to use the ...