Less of me, more of God. Less of me, more of God. Repeat after me . . . . This is the mantra of my life. You’d think I would have caught on by now, really adopted, integrated and incorporated the idea. Ha! Still trying. It came up again for me yesterday when I got an email from a friend just finishing divinity school. She wrote to ask me for advice on purchasing a robe (clerical, not bath). We Baptists... Read more
Okay, let’s be honest. Upon meeting and getting to know certain members of their church some pastors question the existence of a benevolent God.Not me, of course. I am speaking only of what I’ve heard in professional circles.So, with that fact in mind, I hate to say this because I think there might be some divine tally sheet keeper who might read this, notice I probably have an inordinant number of wonderful church members, and undertake an effort to change... Read more
Chinese New Year is a holiday that is particularly close to my heart. A lot of people know I grew up in Hawaii but they probably don’t know that my grandmother was half Chinese. Her father immigrated to the Hawaiian Islands from Mainland China to work on a pineapple plantation in the mid-1800s. Needless to say, I have a lot of Chinese relatives. And they love to celebrate Chinese New Year. My childhood memories of Chinese New Year involve, first... Read more
I was thinking about falling in love today. Specifically, I was thinking about how we human beings pine for it, idealize it, live for it. And falling in love seems to come along so infrequently. What would you guess—the number of times an average person falls in love over a lifetime, that is—two, three (if you count your high school boyfriend)? It might sound like a strange thing to be thinking about on a Wednesday afternoon, but not really. See,... Read more
“We are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Christian body committed to living faithfully in the heart of this great city. To that end we strive to be welcoming, responsive, trusting and prayerful in everything we do.” Wonderful, isn’t it? Wish I had had something to do with it. Alas, Calvary came up with this statement as part of a larger mission statement after a months-long visioning process led by interim pastor Jere Allen long before I arrived on the scene. This vision... Read more
Admittedly my perspective is a bit foggy, having been prescribed assistance to deal with the pain of recent events (see my Tale of Woe). However, my foggy perspective has not, in my opinion, impacted my astute observations of modern culture or my unmanageable compulsion to comment on those observations.Here I note a few recent thoughts on the state of daytime television.Since I have spent the last three days peering through the fog of a pretty bad headache at shows like... Read more
Depending on the time of day (and where we happen to be in the schedule of pain medication), the latest drama in my life is either an annoying distraction or a horrific tragedy of epic proportions.Knowing myself as I do the truth is probably somewhere in between. Let me tell you my tale of woe.On Monday morning I was headed down 16th Street on my way to a meeting. My kids were out of school Monday, so they were over... Read more
Calvary is a congregation in transition. That means, as the years have gone by, Calvary’s young families have gradually transitioned from that phase of life to middle age and on to, shall we say, the later years of life. While this faithful group of folks in the later years of life continues to worship and serve in ways that often astound me, to their great relief there is now a new group of folks a little behind on the path... Read more
This is the danger of spending so much time with one text—you start to see it everywhere you go. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for my sitting in the movie theatre Saturday watching Heath Ledger in Casanova and drawing parallels between the movie and Sunday’s gospel lesson, Mark 1:14-20. Truth be told, without a little prompting I probably would have been content to just sit there and watch Heath Ledger. But it was really my friend... Read more
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