It was late fall and the leaves were almost completely off the trees but hadn’t been raked. At the end of our street was a 90 degree turn because we lived on a horseshoe. One morning, shortly after receiving my driver’s license, I was fiddling with music in my car and wasn’t paying attention. As I looked up the turn was coming at me. I slammed on the brakes and slid into a bank of mailboxes. Thinking nobody saw me, I continued on to school.

Later that day, I was home watching TV when the phone rang and my mom answered it. Something in me knew I was done for.

“Dan, were you involved in a hit and run today?” my mom asked.

“Me? No I didn’t hit anyone. Come on.” I replied.

“Well that was the police and they said someone reported that you hit the mailboxes at the end of the street this morning and fled the scene.”

“Oh. Yeah. That was me.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

That’s a question that is on the tip of many tongues. Too often too many people feel as though they are experiencing injustices.

There is a great picture floating around on social media. It’s a photo of two kids on a medal platform. The kid in first place has a sour look on his face. The kid in third place is rejoicing! The caption typically reads something like this, “Happiness is all about your perspective.”

I dig that sentiment.

Are you a parent? I am and I struggle daily with being a parent. It’s really hard and scary work. Parenting is not for the faint of heart.

In America we organize everything around our kids. Over the last few years there have been helicopter parents and now lawn mower parents (I’ll let you hit the Duck Duck Go Machine if you don’t know what those are).

A conversation…

“I could never be a pastor. I don’t know how you do it."

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You have to walk through all the terrible stuff in people’s lives. You’re face to face with all the bad stuff all the time. I guess, I don’t understand how a pastor could ever stay a Christian. It seems like it would be really hard to keep the faith when you see all the times that God doesn’t do what you want."

Where do you find your roots? Is your identity rooted somewhere? How do you know who you are?

As we walk through this life I think that this might be one of the most important questions that we face. The world comes at us pretty fast and more times than not the knowledge of who we are helps us to know what to do.

There are times when we feel like nobody cares about us. Sometimes, we feel all alone. That sense of being alone in the world is brutal. It lays us bare. It can feel like a million pounds is weighing us down.

This sense of being alone in the world and that nobody cares is not something new. It is common to the human experience.

Some Bible passages make us super uncomfortable in the modern era. It’s often because we don’t take time to think about what they’re saying and what they’re not saying.

The Scriptures were not written in a vacuum, culturally or otherwise. Neither should we interpret them that way. Nor are all passages written in the same genre and so we must take the time to understand what is happening in a particular passage.

Psalm 122 is one of those kinds of passages.

Have you ever noticed that life isn’t quite as easy as everyone says it’s supposed to be?

Our conversations so often look like this:

“How are you?" “Fine. Everything’s good."

Then you find out they are dealing with marital problems, cancer, or something else super hard.

Why do we need to gather together in community? Have you ever thought about it? Seriously, why?

To gather in community is not something that only Christians do. People from all kinds of religions meet together. Non-religious people gather in community, why? What is it about gathering together that we feel the necessity to do so?

There are few passages in the Scriptures that have impacted me more than 2 Corinthians 5. The whole chapter is amazing as it centers on the reality of the one who seeks to follow Jesus is a “new creation.” The ultimate result of this new reality is that the follower of Jesus is called an “ambassador” and is entrusted with the “ministry of reconciliation.”

As you might imagine a pastor is connected with a lot of people and accounts online about religion. My feeds are filled with other religious people and with people critical of religious people. If there is one particular kind of thread that I see often it goes like this:

>Christians only care about getting folks “saved.” The rampant hypocrisy of >the Christian is overwhelming. I love Christ but despise Christians.

To be clear, the particulars of this thread change, but that’s the heart of it. I see it from Christians and non-Christians. I see it from theists and atheists.

One of my favorite lines in any comic book or movie is the one from Uncle Ben, Peter Parker’s uncle in Spiderman. He said to his nephew, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

That line is memorable because I think we know that it is inherently true. We live in a world where so often we see the opposite. People with great power in our culture tend to abuse it. The powerful, with many exceptions, often use their power to amass more power. The wealthy, with many exceptions, use their wealth to amass more wealth.