sometimes I think in sermon illustrations

Thoughts from the Sukkah

  Scenes from our Sukkah It’s the time of year when those with an eye to keeping ancient feast days are finding a way to live outside for a week, in remembrance of the time when God dwelt with his people in the wilderness. Usually, when our family does this […]

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We Are Small

Sometimes I want to quit. Pack it in. Go home. Sometimes I feel like all our work, all my efforts, are just a drop in a bucket or worse, completely futile. A class I had organized is on hold because the participants are afraid to be seen gathering in public […]

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The Blessing of Water

After rainy season comes dry season. Gradually the rain peters out, and suddenly you realize that it’s been a few weeks since it has rained at all, and then a few months. It may rain once or twice during this season, what we call winter, because it’s cool, but not […]

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100 Millions Bits of Kindness

Sometimes the kids and I get into these conversations about why we’re here and what our job is while we are. (I’m not talking about Thailand, but about the larger cosmic issues of existence and meaning, etc. Which does eventually tie into why we came to Thailand, but anyway.) We […]

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This is what we do with broken things

He couldn’t know that the glass he broke was something thrifted, or from the dollar store, I don’t remember which. And as a first time dinner guest at my in-laws house he was busy apologizing over the wine glass and offering to replace it, not really believing my mother in […]

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On not feeding boogeymen

So this guy named John Piper caused some brouhaha in certain circles I travel on the internet. You see, he was quoted as addressing a room full of male pastors and saying that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel”. This of course offended a lot of Christian women, and […]

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For When the Going Gets Tough

One of the things I inherited somehow from my Christian upbringing was this idea that if God is behind something, it should be easy, simple, smooth, etc. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone use that as criteria for choosing a direction in their life, or whether or […]

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Adornment

All morning, whenever I sit still for her, Little is making me a princess. She inserts hair pins at random, and brushes and pulls. Bangles and bracelets pile up on my wrists, necklaces stack up under my chin.”You look so beautiful mommy”, she says. “You have to keep your princess […]

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The Horrible Weight of Freedom

photo by aparejador– Used under CC licence Sometimes when I’m hurtling down the freeway at 70 miles an hour, all 4 children tucked into seats in the back and the road curves slightly and I feel the tug of inertia against the change in direction I wonder at the fact […]

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