My desk is usually organized using the highly technical "stack method": there's a stack for scrap paper, a stack for my to-do list, a stack for long-term concerns, a stack for things to keep track of until Sunday . . . just a lot of stacks of paper, folders, books, and other things. (Right now I even have a stack of plaques and pamphlets.) At any moment, I can lay my hands on exactly what I need because I know it's somewhere in that stack. Of course, the filing cabinet and trays help for other things, but they operate on basically the same principle: everything in its place, and a place for every thing. Everything I need to do my job is sorted into its proper compartment, so to speak. It wou

Tucked inside the Christmas section of many hymnals is a poem by Christina Rossetti, later set to music by the great Gustav Holst: "In the Bleak Midwinter." It's about the mystery of a God whom "heaven cannot hold" come down to earth in a stable who will come again to reign. The only proper response to such love, it says, is to "give him my heart." With all that goodness and love packed into four stanzas, I've often wondered why it's called "bleak" midwinter. With that said, we're currently in that particular season; January will soon end, but winter will carry on for another month. Winter is a dark time for the soul. Depression cases increase as seasonal affective disorder begins. After Chr

The Church of England has gone off the deep end once again, this time offering the rite of baptism as a way to celebrate a sex change surgery or embracing a transgender identity, moments the bishops are calling the beginning of a new life just as surely as if one were to be made a new creation in the Holy Spirit. Such a thing is unfathomable biblically, but it's also unthinkable historically, even just in terms of the denomination. The founding slogan, the basic premise, of the Anglican Church was via media -- "a middle way." It was designed to be part Roman Catholic and part Protestant, a middle way between the two. Now it's not a middle ground for anything. I like the idea of via media for

Every January, I go through all my files, both paper and electronic, and get rid of things I no longer need. This year I went a step further and decided I didn't really need to keep every birthday card or concert program I've ever had, so I ended tossing about two garbage bags full of nothing but paper. I'm in the process of moving things from my current church computer to the new one, and the same cleaning is happening. Sometimes you just need to get rid of the clutter. Clutter can interfere with what really matters in more ways than one. The most obvious hang-up is that it can tie up space you need for new things. Yes, you may one day need to refer to that newspaper clipping about the funn

Friendship has been a major topic of research for some time now. It's easy to understand why: no one has friends anymore. It is said the average American man is the loneliest he has ever been in history, and American women don't fare much better. For all of our gadgets and gizmos to connect us, we're more isolated than ever. Even churches have failed in this respect. Continuing my theme from Wednesday, we used to have songs about friends. Some were about heaven, too; "I'll Meet You in the Morning," "If We Never Meet Again," and "I Dreamed I Searched Heaven for You" all express our love of others and our hope (or concern) for their souls. Nowadays, we don't have songs like that. Why? Because

I love contemporary Christian music (CCM). I have a list of songs I wish we'd sing in worship, as a matter of fact. But I also have a list of criticisms of CCM, and one hit me in a big way this week. Of all the things we sing about in CCM, we seem to incredibly rarely sing about heaven. And that's a mistake. Maybe it's because I grew up with a hymnal titled Heavenly Highway Hymns, or maybe it's because of the deteriorating state of the world today, but I enjoy -- and consequently miss -- singing about heaven. We cover a lot of ground with Christus Victor, Christ giving us victory over evil through the cross, but it all seems temporal, earthly. We need to recognize our victory over sin in thi

A friend of mine, Claire*, recently sent me a disheartening message on Facebook: "It scares me thinking I have to essentially brainwash myself to believe something." She went on to say her faith is wavering greatly right now, and this woman with a master's degree in Christian education is teetering on the edge of atheism. "I can't let go completely because I'm still scared of hell," she confessed, "but is fear enough to make up for not being able to convince myself to love God anymore?" I wish I could tell you I singlehandedly won her back to full faith in Jesus Christ that day. I didn't. Claire's story is far too common these days. Persons of devout faith explore other things -- other relig

One of the most curious details included in the Bible, in my opinion, is in 2 Samuel 23:20. In a list of David's Mighty Men, we find Benaiah, who "struck down Moab's two mightiest warriors. He also went down into a pit on a snowy day and killed a lion." Killing a lion is surely a noteworthy feat; killing one at close quarters in a pit, even more so. But why "on a snowy day"? Just because snow was rare? Lions don't hunt in winter weather? I don't know! (Personally, if I want lions and snow, I prefer The Chronicles of Narnia.) Our forecast winter weather has me thinking about snow, and that brought me to Benaiah's story. What do we do in the snow? Not hunt lions. We sled, make snowmen, have sn

If there's one thing I've never been called in my life, it's "optimist." Do I try to hope for the best? Absolutely. But the best rarely happens. Do I see the world as a pessimist? Nope. The worst rarely happens, either. I call myself a realist: I want the good things to happen, but I prepare for the bad, and I keep my view somewhere in the middle -- where things really are. It means that different people will see me differently, some as a killjoy, some as a dreamer, but no matter what, I try to present the facts as they are. I think the Bible is a realist book. Ecclesiastes keeps us grounded by reminding us not everything in life is going to be easy or lovely or wonderful. The New Testament

There's an old saying: "it's the little things in life that bring the most pleasure." (Or something like that.) For my money, that's true. Sure, the big things may deliver the most happiness for a specific, usually quite short, amount of time, but the little things just keep on giving. The joys of the sound of rain on a metal roof, the smell of old books, the taste of the first bite of your favorite dessert after you've not had it for a while -- these never really diminish with time. They just keep making you happy again and again and again. It seems we, as a society, have all turned into Calvins of "Calvin & Hobbes" fame: happiness isn't enough; we demand euphoria. We aren't content with th

Our annual congregational meeting is on the twenty-first of this month. In order to prepare for that and our first board meeting on Tuesday, I've spent a lot of time this week writing up reports. To be fair, I may have gone a bit overboard; I'm not entirely convinced I needed to make the two graphs, but it couldn't hurt, so why worry? In any event, I have been inundated with numbers and statistics this week. The number of visitors I've had, how many homes I've visited, how many lessons I've taught, average attendance figures, budget lines . . . I even completed a survey just this morning from Christian Standard making a record of Christian Church statistics for 2017. ('Tis the season.) It's

In a move that probably surprises no one, I've already finished my first book of 2018 and started reading the second. That first book, a sci-fi novel and the first in a new series, features a rather unique system of government for a galactic empire. They call it "The Interdependency." The idea is that every human world must rely on each of the others in order to survive. One planet grows fruit, another makes plastics, another handles freight shipping, etc., but nobody does two things. They're forced to be dependent upon each other simply to exist. Such a model flies in the face of our American ethos. We value being independent above all else; the very idea of being interdependent, of having