The Gospel and the Classroom: HPCA and a boy named Kyseem
 
The non-sectarian public school is one of the treasured gifts of the American tradition. Its critical place in our civic life is unquestioned. But the private, often Christian, school is also an essential American tradition that has deepened and continues to deepen the conversation in the public square. Christian education has often acted as a corrective and conscience, especially as non-sectarian sometimes becomes aggressively secular (and hence no longer non-sectarian). Service in explicitly Christian education is a vital ministry to which God calls some of his people. Continue reading →

Why Bother? 30 Hours, Haiti and Tenwek
 
As they have for more than a decade, middle and high school students from LPC and the community will gather during a late winter weekend for what is called the 30 Hour Famine. The 90+ kids and many of the 100+ adults who will play a role in the weekend will quit eating at noon today and not eat again until 6:00 p.m. Saturday. 30 Hours without food. But 30 hours filled with opportunities to learn and serve and have a little fun. The kids will spend the night at LPC in a “tent city” set up in the Fellowship Hall and elsewhere. There will be games and songs and lots of things to do, and as their stomachs begin to growl, they will be reminded of a world where nearly 1 billion people – one in seven of the world’s population – will go to bed hungry. Why bother? What good does it do to miss three or four meals? Continue reading →

Grace Like a Snow Plow

After this month’s blizzards 2.0 and 2.1 the street where we live was a mess. The township was to blame and we lazy residents were to blame. The township plowed the street maybe once, just a single pass around the loop that makes up our development. When it became clear that that was all the plowing we were going to get, some of the neighbors got to work and shoveled and cleared the street in front of their houses right to curb. Others shoveled their own driveways, but left slushy ice piles in the street. Some folks simply powered their way through the snow drifts and during the two weeks before blizzard 2.2 hit yesterday, they became more and more comfortable parking on the ice as close to the curb as they could get, which wasn’t all that close. It was a mess. Continue reading →

How Rich Were We?
 
On Sunday we begin a two-week look at the ways that financial pressures complicate our quest for a more simple and Christ-focused life. The research for the sermon has been fascinating, though at times I came close to drowning in a sea of statistics. But I dog paddle well enough and made it safely to shore before the last wave of numbers threatened to pull me under.
 
I’ve read about the national debt and consumer debt (non-mortgage debt such as car loans and credit card debt), and the metaphor of drowning becomes more serious as we measure our situation. We’re in trouble. No wonder finances are among the big three stressors in our lives (along with time and relationships).
 
I’m no economist, but it seems pretty simple. We have debt because we borrow. We borrow because we want something we can’t afford. And some – not all – that we want and for which we borrow, we want a lot more than we need. Simple to describe, difficult, nearly impossible, for some to escape. Continue reading →

Godly Disruptions of a Predictable Routine
 
I had not penciled in several hours of snow shoveling on my weekly calendar. I had not expected to be searching the shelves in the garage, flashlight in hand, for that old backpacking stove after the power went out late Wednesday afternoon. I didn’t know that Faith Acts would be canceled. But neither had I expected a Tuesday afternoon invitation for an early Wednesday morning walk through snowy Langhorne and the wonderful conversation and prayer I’d share with the faithful friend who invited me. I hadn’t thought of Scrabble by candlelight the night the power went off, but Becky did and it was great (Becky won – she played her Q more shrewdly than I played my Z). I could not have imagined the beauty of the snowy landscape under bright blue skies yesterday and today. Continue reading →