Several weeks ago I shared the wonderful story of Kamate Takoudjou, the seven-year old boy from the Cameroon in West Africa who had lost sight in one eye due to an injury to his cornea and subsequent scar tissue that was causing the blindness.

You may remember how God brought together friends known and unknown, brothers and sisters in Christ, to allow Kamate to undergo the complicated transplant surgery he needed. From the Cameroon to Kenya, from the Wills Eye Institute in Philadelphia to Langhorne Presbyterian Church, God was at work for his good purposes.

We thank God for the faithfulness of parents and friends, physicians and church members, medical technology and a mission budget, all of which made Kamate’s surgery possible.  Mostly, though, we thank God for his amazing grace. Continue reading →

Last night’s Conan O’Brien television program featured an on-stage wedding presided over by the host himself. Of course, it is not the first time vows have been said on late night television. Some of us are old enough to remember Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki tying the knot on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show back in 1969, though unlike Conan, Carson did not officiate.

The fact that the two people married last night were both men may have garnered some extra headlines and publicity for Conan. Continue reading →

Forget Halloween. Forget the candy and the costumes.  We’ve got a hat trick of great holidays that will get the week off to a wonderful start: Reformation Day on Monday, All Saints Day on Tuesday and All Souls Day on Wednesday.  They are worth celebrating.

First up is Reformation Day. The medieval church marked October 31 as All Saints Eve or All Hallows Eve (hence Halloween). Martin Luther chose the day in 1517 to post his 95 Theses on the chapel door in Wittenberg.  The 95 Theses were a long list of theological abuses and pastoral malpractice Luther saw plaguing the medieval church. So he went to the chapel and nailed his list to the door. Nothing hugely significant about the chapel door. It was the community bulletin board and his wouldn’t be the only notice, though possibly the longest, tacked on the door for all to read. The chapel door was a sort of old-fashioned You Tube. The 95 Theses went viral. Continue reading →

“U.S. Misery Index Rises to Highest Since 1983,” the headline reads. The Misery Index is an unofficial gauge of economic well being and is calculated by the sum of the unemployment and inflation rates.

I don’t remember how miserable I was in 1983, but I will trust the index to remind me that it must have been pretty bad. In fact, you can chart your relative misery over the last forty years here. Turns out that we’ve never been happier than we were in April of 1998.  Or so miserable as June, 1980.

The last time the Misery Index was as high as this month’s 13.0 was May, 1983.  Let’s see, that’s the month Becky and I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I had taken a church staff position. Katharine had just turned three and Christopher was four months old. Our children have always been a great joy and those early years of family life were wonderfully full. From the first day we knew we would love the Pacific Northwest and our eight years at Lake Grove Presbyterian Church taught us much about the blessings of life in the family of God. Continue reading →

(Click here for the sermon preached at the ordination service)

Our former seminary interns and staff members Jonathan and Kristy LaBarge will be ordained by Santa Barbara Presbytery as teaching elders in the Presbyterian Church (USA) on Saturday afternoon in a service at their home church in Ojai, California.  On Sunday they will be installed by San Fernando Presbytery as the co-pastors of Canoga Park Presbyterian Church during Lord’s Day morning worship.  Both services will be times of great celebration and thanks to God.

I am not sure I had yet warmed the chair in my office shortly after arriving at LPC when a particularly persuasive (and truly wonderful) elder asked if I would be open to serving as Field Education Supervisor for two Princeton Seminary students who had made LPC and its contemporary worship service their church home for the previous eighteen months. Continue reading →