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"You're not going out in all that wind, are you?" Wanda was cropping pictures for a memory-book page. "Can't let a little wind keep me from my Sunday-afternoon walk." "Well, at least tell me where you're headed. And take the cell phone with you." "I'll drive to Palmer Park and do my loop in the woods. And I'll take the phone, but if a tree falls on me, I doubt that I'll be doing much dialing." Although I had acted…

John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a classic of Christian spirituality, has often been viewed as the archetypal struggle of the solitary Christian toward the goal of salvation. It is that, to be sure, but to see it that way may miss an equally important insight. No one makes the journey alone. John Bunyan was a Puritan who lived amidst the contentious and conflicted society of seventeenth-century England. He was a tinker--an itinerant worker who repaired pots, kettles, pans, etc.; the name…

Madison Square Christian Reformed Church, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, plays a significant role in the life of the southeast side of that city. Started in 1914 as a storefront gospel mission in a sketchy neighborhood "down by the tracks," Madison Square took a long time to move to regular congregational status; it finally happened after fifty six years, in 1970. But then, by reinvesting itself even more fully in its neighborhood, it reaped remarkable returns. In the last forty years,…

"Homosexuality is a burden that homosexual people are called to bear, and bear as morally as possible, even though they never chose to bear it" (229). So wrote Lewis Smedes in his 1994 revised edition of Sex for Christians. Last year was the tenth anniversary of Smedes' powerful Perspectives essay, "Like the Wideness of the Sea" (May 1999), which lamented his (Christian Reformed) church's one-time marginalization of divorced people, and similarly of gays and lesbians. Whomever Paul had in mind…

Rick Warren and Jim Wallis are to the first decade of the twenty-first century what James Dobson and John Howard Yoder were to the final decades of the twentieth. Building on the success of his The Purpose Driven® Church (1995), Warren's The Purpose Driven® Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (2001) became the self-help book for evangelical Christians. As the book flap promised, "Knowing God's purpose for creating you will reduce your stress, focus your energy, simply your…

Psalm 85 was likely composed and used in worship after the Israelites came home from their captivity in Babylon. In other words, it is a psalm of people well acquainted with death. These former captives tasted death. They lived death. Now, they are now seeking some answers. I understand what they were feeling. I am still grated by death's grasp as my wife and I grieve the loss of another pregnancy. This is the second one--and the second time on…