Welcome or welcome back.  While there’s something new about all this, there’s also something old as I continue a 20+-year tradition of weekly comments, reflections, and thoughts on life and faith – life lived faithfully and faith made real in life. After a six-week break, it’s good to be back!

Most of you know that Becky and I have just moved 630 miles west and are settling into a new house and a new community.  All’s well so far.

As we divide the labor for this move, one of the things I’ve taken on is address changes, closing old accounts and opening new ones, and figuring our drivers licenses and car registrations and things of that sort. Becky’s share of the labor is much greater.

When I told the Post Office about our new address, they asked if we would like to open an “Informed Delivery Account.” We said, “Sure, whatever Informed Delivery might be.” Continue reading →

Welcome! OBSERVATIONS continues a long series of posts reflecting on the life of faith lived in our real world.  Each new Observation will be posted here, linked from my FaceBook page, or you may subscribe to an email version by clicking the “Subscribe” button on the sidebar.

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. Jeremiah 29:4–7

It is cliche to say that 2020 is unlike any year we able to remember. Cliche, but true.  We have yet to see what might even be the beginning of the end of the global pandemic. Injustice shouts at us; we want desperately, but do not quite know how, to live more fully into our American dream and ideals. To borrow a phrase from Cornelius Plantinga – and with all the meaning he gave it, things are not the way they are supposed to be. Continue reading →