So few things in life manage to stay the course and endure for any real length of time. Clothes turn threadbare, shoes fall apart, cars quit, couches break and sag. (I even seem to go through toothbrushes fairly quickly.) On a longer-but-still-not-permanent timescale, empires fall, borders get redrawn, businesses go under, and churches die. Nothing of this world is permanent. Isaiah 40:8 offers us the one thing we can touch in this life which will last: "The grass withers, an

Those in caregiving professions (nurses, clergy, social workers, counselors, and others) often speak of "burden of care." Simply put, it's the personal cost of providing care to someone: giving up time and resources, emotional strain, etc. in order to provide for the needs of another individual. For example, taking care of your bedridden mother at home comes with a high burden of care: money, energy, and love all factor in to making sure she's OK, and there are many levels of

If you've ever bought groceries, you've looked at a sale paper. Before you went to the store, you checked to see if anything you needed would be cheaper that week or perhaps on sale at a different store entirely. Some things you only buy when they are on sale, and so you carefully scan all the circulars to see if this is the week you can get everything you want to fill the pantry. Sale papers (and coupons, for that matter) are some of my best friends. With that said, problems

We've all heard the saying "cold hands, warm heart." I certainly hope that's true. My hands are perpetually cold, and now that the temperatures outside have taken quite a tumble from a week ago, I'm beginning to feel increasingly like Bob Cratchit as I hunch over my keyboard with frozen fingers. (This is why I put a space heater in my office during the winter months.) I daresay many of us now have cold hands, and as October gives way to November, I expect they'll get colder s

People tell me I was born in the wrong London. They base this assertion on things like the fact I have a kitchen cabinet devoted to tea, watch more British shows than American ones, prefer British literature to American books, and share a birthday with Queen Elizabeth II. Parliament is more fun to watch than Congress, and I even prefer the way the U.K. handles its political ads compared to the way we do it here. Truth be told, some days I'm a pretty bad American. I dearly lov

At my eighth-grade band banquet, one of my best friends handed me a cupcake. I started to take a bite, but he stopped me. "No," he said. "You're a saxophone player! You eat cupcakes IN ONE BITE!" So, like any fourteen-year-old boy would do, I promptly shoved an entire chocolate cupcake in my mouth. While I was successful at eventually choking it down, this remain my personal go-to experience with a time-honored adage: don't bite off more than you can chew. Usually we take it

In 49BC, Julius Caesar stood on the banks of the Rubicon River. If he marched his army (the 13th Legion) across the shallow ford he now faced, it would be an open declaration of war against the Roman Senate. If he won that war, he would rule the known world. If he failed, he would lose his governorship and his life. After some time of deliberation, Caesar proclaimed, "Alea iacta est" -- "The die is cast" -- and crossed the Rubicon with his legion, launching the Roman Civil Wa

Last weekend I engaged in the thrilling task of getting rid of some of my stuff. I hauled a carload to Goodwill, but that was the easy part. It's not too difficult to let go of old furniture and such. The hard part came from going through my filing cabinet. In a folder simply marked "Personal," I unearthed things I definitely needed to keep -- my birth certificate, Selective Service registration card, all that fun stuff -- but I also threw away or shredded a large stack of ot

With the start of October, we've officially entered what I call "Holidaytide." In the church calendar, the fifty days following Resurrection Sunday are Eastertide; the twelve days of Christmas are Christmastide; and so I've proposed we refer to the months of October, November, and December collectively as "Holidaytide." From here until the end of the year, we prepare for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (or, as a great-grandmother once said in 1999, Halloween, Thanksgi