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If you know a pastor’s spouse, check in with them. Give honest space to share. They might be bearing more than you know. Pastoring can be a very hard and demanding job. I know. I’ve been there. But I’ve also come to learn that being a pastor’s spouse brings unique challenges of its own, burdens often not known or understood.

God unmistakably did call Dr. Ida. Though she was determined not to follow her father and his seven siblings into RCA mission work, determined not to spend her life in "dirty, dusty" India, she found she could do nothing else after being present one night at the successive deaths of three women in childbirth because their husbands refused for cultural and religious reasons to allow male doctors to attend them. As she heard the funeral drums the morning after all…

Worship is the place where we face our fears, the place where we empty ourselves and wait to see if what Jesus said is actually true: “If you seek your life, you’ll lose it, but if you lose it, you’ll find it; unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Worship is the place where we wait for the fierce love of God to do its…

Poetry fills the Bible. It spills from column to column and page to page. It covers one-third of the entire Old Testament. The book of Psalms, the largest book in the Bible, offers up 150 poems. Surrounding those poems, one prophet after another laments, condemns, and comforts in ringing lines of verse. The entire creation story of Genesis 1, quite arguably, has been composed as a single poem of repetition and variation, crowned by the creation of human beings.

It’s no longer time for each side to blame the other side for what happened. Angry, mocking words about those jerks on the other side are unhelpful. That’s the kind of thing that unbelievers are especially watching for. People of the world don’t care if we’re organizationally or institutionally one or not. What they want to see is whether or not we love one another.

I’ve submitted to endless rounds of treatment and taken buckets of medications for one thing: Life Moments. By that, I don’t mean the completion of a “bucket list” of meaningful experiences. I mean Life Moments as the intentional investing into something outside of myself that brings joy.

I’m no theologian, but I am a Bible-reading Christ follower, and after rereading the gospels recently, I can’t cite an instance where Jesus meets needy people honestly seeking him and keeps them away: Samaritans, prostitutes, lepers, adulterers, demon-possessed, tax collectors, prodigal sons. Regardless of their sins or ailments or reputations, he opens the gate to every one of them. It’s the Pharisees and, sometimes, the over-zealous disciples he reprimands for trying to close it.

Regardless of the various idols scattered throughout contemporary society, God keeps offering us the amazing gift of prayer, the assurance that God is still listening and still speaking, especially in the beauty and holiness of the sheer silence of the still small voice that is beckoning to us.