I am attending the meeting of the General Assembly next week. And I am looking forward to it.  Whoever thought I might put those two sentences back to back. An oxymoronic reality.

A little background before I get on the plane to Denver early Monday evening.

General assemblies are Presbyterian things, a court or council of the larger church.  In our former denomination the general assembly was the highest court of the church with synods, presbyteries, and sessions further down the food chain. Its meetings could be cumbersome and bureaucratic, outsiders not to feel much welcome. The EPC has wisely nixed the archaic synod, so by Book of Order definition, “The General Assembly, composed of all the courts and local churches of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, expresses the unity and relatedness of all the parts. It has the responsibility of overseeing the total work of the Church.” Pastors, elders, and visitors alike. EPC general assemblies are joy-filled and welcoming. Continue reading →

Andrew, not his real name, walked into the church office Wednesday afternoon as Tyler, our youth director, and I were conferring about Sunday’s message.  He spoke with Sandy first and she heard enough of his story to know that it was worth his waiting to talk. Tyler and I finished our conversation, Tyler heading back to his office and Sandy to tell me just a little about Andrew, this young man waiting patiently in the outer office. His situation was more than some food from the food pantry might resolve.

The back and forth with Tyler probably took five seconds.

“This sounds important.  Would you like to talk to him or shall I?” I asked.
“Let’s tag team it,” Tyler answered.

So, we tag teamed it and for the next hour and a half Tyler and I talked with Andrew.  Suffice it to say that Andrew was as confused as he was hungry, as friendless as he was penniless, and a long way from home. Continue reading →

I left for the office early Thursday morning. The sky was gray with the dawn’s early light, but a strange darkness filled the street as I wound my way out of Windy Bush, the development where we live, onto Maple Avenue. Our power had gone out during Wednesday evening’s storms and, despite PECO’s assurances to the contrary, it was still out ten hours later.

But it wasn’t out everywhere. In fact, it seemed as if it was out nowhere but our little development.  141 customers, the PECO outage alert told us.

A bright and brilliant green light welcomed me to Maple Avenue.  An “open” sign blinked happily in the window of Dunkin Donuts.  The cheery glow of streetlights cut the gray darkness of the morning as I drove down Maple Avenue toward the borough. Porch lights were on at some houses and light shined through the windows of early risers getting ready for work or school.  The rest of the world was oblivious to the dark pall draped over the lives of 141 of us still in the bleak darkness of our power outage. Continue reading →

Last week I used a quote from a book I had not read in forty years.  I found the quote, but not in the place in the book where I was sure I would find it. My search reminded me of the story told and why I ought to read it again.  “A Severe Mercy” is, as my torn dust cover says, “a real-life story full of wonder and hope.” Sheldon Vanauken recounts the years in the mid-1950’s he and his wife Davy were graduate students in Oxford.  They meet new people, many of them, surprisingly, Christians, befriend C.S. Lewis, then teaching at Oxford, and in God’s time make their own commitments to Christ and the ways of the Kingdom.

The severe mercy of the book’s title is a phrase given by Lewis in a letter to Vanauken following their return to the U.S. and Davy’s untimely death from a rare infection.

I re-read “A Severe Mercy” this week and was taken by Sheldon Vanauken’s story of their conversion.  Well-read, intellectual, sophisticated, Sheldon and Davy had early on dismissed the possibility Christian faith playing a part in their lives. But new friends and Lewis’ care and wisdom began to challenge that early dismissal of Christ. Continue reading →

On our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple Becky gave me a book by Sheldon Vanauken titled “A Severe Mercy.”  It’s the story of a Sheldon and his wife Davy, a young couple in love and their journey to faith and hope and finally to the untimely death of Davy. At the middle of the story is a friendship with C.S. Lewis during their years as students at Oxford.  I opened the book again this week and intend to read it again.

The passage for which I was looking tells of Sheldon’s last visit with Lewis.  The two met at Eastgate pub in Oxford and spent a long lunch together.  Vanauken tells of the end of the afternoon: Continue reading →