“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.” – Goethe I can’t think of a better way to start the week than by taking Goethe’s advice to heart. I’m thoroughly enchanted with autumn this year, so…
Sight Reading for the Musically Impaired: This course will teach you how to figure out whether a hymn is suitable for piano, guitar, or a capella singing. In addition, you will learn how to determine if a hymn goes above and/or below the normal human vocal range, and whether or not the rhythms of the…
Cottonwood, maple, elm, cedar, chinquapin, honeylocust, willow, bur oak, red oak. Not to mention duckweed, sumac, and poison ivy. And then there was the wolf spider, the garter snake, the bullfrog. Last Saturday morning I was delighted to walk through the woods with someone who introduced me to all of these parts of God’s creation.…
(Full disclosure: I have an undergrad degree in creative writing and a master’s in English lit.) I love poetry. I love reading it. I love writing it. But I don’t write it much any more. Back in the spring I went on a mini-spurt of poetry writing and the first two poems I wrote were…
Just to let you know, I post my sermons on the Peace Mennonite Church blog at http://www.peacepreacher.wordpress.com. They are on the “Sermons” page. I just finished up a series on Micah, which was a lot of fun. I enjoy the challenge of preaching from the Old Testament. And I really appreciated being able to spend…
I am grateful tonight for a lovely time spent with my relatives David and Dawn. (David is my grandpa’s first cousin. So that makes him my . . . ) I last saw them about thirteen years ago when my husband and I visited New York City and stayed with them in New Jersey. I…
I’ll be honest about the Faith Forum column below: I just started writing “religion isn’t” statements and then quit when I hit the 300 word limit. But I could have kept going. I think next on my list would be: “Religion isn’t optional.” It was interesting that the other pastor who responded to this prompt…
This was my contribution to the Faith Forum column in the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper for Saturday, October 9, 2010. I’m posting it here for the benefit of at least one person who missed it in the paper and wanted to read it. The prompt–“religion isn’t”–seemed random, but proved to be an interesting topic. Religion isn’t…
I have a source inside Disney World who shared with me a disturbing incident. It seems that she was leaving the Disney “underground” to go up to work when she saw a guy getting into a Minnie Mouse costume. With a mere turn of the head she then witnessed a woman pulling on a Mickey…
Friday night my husband and I watched The Joneses. It’s about a “family” that moves into a wealthy neighborhood for the sole purpose of marketing products. The cars, the golf clubs, the video game systems, the jogging suits, the frozen hors d’oeuvres—it’s all product placement. The premise of the movie got me thinking about evangelism—the…
Spacious Faith 