You are beautiful.  Gorgeous, actually.  I’m not saying that just because I’m your mother.  Ignore any messages that suggest otherwise. Don’t listen to the voices who tell you you can’t do it.  You can. You are surrounded by amazing women.  Be like them. Follow your heart; it will always lead you home.  Sounds hokey but it’s largely true. Call your Mom a lot. Read more

Promises, Promises: Father of a Nation Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Some of you know that I recently moved.  On one of the many days of cleaning out things I’d stored for later but hadn’t looked at in years, I came across a well-worn piece of paper that was a list of all the possible names under consideration for my first child.  When I started the list almost twenty years ago, I knew that I was going to become a parent, but... Read more

from Searching for Mercy Street, by Linda Gray Sexton “As I wrote the book, I found myself reliving times that were both painful and joyous, accompanied by intense emotion.  Many readers asked me if the process of writing it had been cathartic, and the first time the question was posed, I hesitated, looking for the right way to explain how writing a memoir impacts one’s life.  It had not been cathartic, exactly.  The catharsis had happened before I wrote the... Read more

I don’t like Lauren Winner.  I guess that’s not really fair, since I’ve never met her and I am sure she is a nice person, but I mean I don’t like her in the sense that I didn’t like her book Girl Meets God.  It may be surprising, then, that I am reading her newest book, Still, during this Lent.  Or maybe it’s not so surprising, since Lent is all about admitting mistakes. It took some convincing for me to... Read more

Promises, Promises: Never Again Genesis 9:8-17 I will never forget that fateful day, about two years ago, at 10:45 one Sunday morning.  It was the day I sat down to print out my final copy of the sermon for that morning and somehow that I can’t figure out still to this day, managed to delete the file.  It was not a delete in the “undo edit” sense of delete.  I completely, somehow, destroyed the entire file and had no sermon... Read more

It’s only a couple days in and I am not feeling so sure about this whole giving stuff up for Lent thing.  I mean, I do something every year—take something on, give something up, etc., but the degree to which the practice actually affects my spiritual life, I will confess, varies widely from year to year. Or day to day, to be honest. This year after talking with several friends about Lenten practice, I decided to go ahead and try... Read more

Ahhh, it’s Lent. I’m not going to lie: yesterday, Ash Wednesday, was a little rough for me.  Perhaps the melancholy came as a side effect of spending an entire, 12-hour, professional day thinking about sin, but I found myself tearing up as I recited over and over again: “The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever…”.  Thank God for that, because while there’s a whole Lenten season stretching out ahead of us ripe for the practice of all the good... Read more