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Yesterday I visited my daughter’s kindergarten class to present our family’s “holiday traditions” at this time of year. A small circle of 14 eager five and six-year-olds sat cross-legged on the floor as my daughter Sam and I, on stools, unearthed the various Christmas surprises we had brought to share. They watched as Sam set…

When he slipped his feet into the tub of warm, herb-infused water, he did so almost apologetically. “Thank you,” he said, tentatively, an edge of either shyness or embarrassment in his tone as she summoned a foot to her lap. Derek, 46, was a drifter. He had been drifting most of his life like a…

Good Friday is like last night’s mindful hot yoga class. It was my first, so I had gone with some trepidation. I hadn’t known what to wear, for one thing, so I put on my only pair of light Spandex, which happen to be a shiny, bright, royal blue. A Christmas gift from hubby several…

Three years ago, when pastor, seminary professor and author A.J. Swoboda’s first book Messy made its debut, I said I hoped the book would not be his last; so when a review copy of Swoboda’s second book, A Glorious Dark, arrived in the mail last week, I was like a kid on Christmas morning unwrapping…

Just over six months ago, a member of our congregation announced he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer: Steve Hayner, the outgoing president of Columbia Theological Seminary, and his wife Sharol, have come to be most associated in my mind with joy; yet Steve’s announcement could not have been sadder. Still, and miraculously, over the…

Today’s break for restless souls looking for the More we’ve yet to find comes from Johnny Cash’s album American V. A Hundred Highways.  “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” first recorded by Cash in 2003, the year of his death, was released in 2006 posthumously; and is an old American gospel folk song, now put to Cash’s…

For the last three years I’ve had the privilege of participating in an annual ecumenical and interracial Good Friday service, “Women’s Views of the Cross.” This year I’ll preach from the perspective of Mary, the mother of James and Joses, who appears for the first time in the Gospel of Mark as a witness to…

We often talk of Lent as a season. Yesterday the woman bagging my groceries made “Lent” a verb. The one-inch-thick, pound-plus bar of Belgian chocolate was already safely tucked away in one of the bags when I explained that for the next 40 days I’d be abstaining from sweets and alcoholic beverages in order to…

This intersection is a place where hopefully you and I both can come and reflect, vent, ask questions and share doubts and experiences without judgement. It’s also a place where you get to be a bit of a guinea pig: rough drafts of passages that will appear in future books of mine tend to make…

Today when we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was both a deeply flawed and greatly inspired public servant and man of God, I am struck by this recollection of King from this morning’s Our Daily Bread devotional: In a sermon in early 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Jesus’ words from Mark 10…
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