Keeping the Maine Thing the Maine Thing
A couple of weeks back I spent the weekend in Maine, officiating a wedding. Yes: it’s an awful job, but someone has to do it. Maine has always been on my travel bucket list, so...
Category: Learning Curve
Michael Brown is your neighbor.
This week, all eyes are on Ferguson, Missouri, where an unarmed black man was killed by a policeman last Saturday. As I write, I’m grieved. Grieved over a broken family. Grieved over a broken community. Grieved...
The Problem with a Well Oiled Machine
If you’ve been around the church world a while, you may have heard someone refer to your ministry as the proverbial “well oiled machine.” Sure, you know the loose screws and the rusty bolts and the...
Insert Your Own Sermon Illustration
Before we get started, you’re going to want to watch this video to set the context (HT @LaughingSquid). (And if you’re reading via an RSS feed or email subscription, you’ll wanna click here.) The story...
The Problem With Outside The Lines
The road in front of our neighborhood has been undergoing a facelift lately. They scraped it, then paved it, then paved it again. Then set up cones. Then more pavement. Then…you get the picture. It’s...
Flashback Friday: Roundabout Living
Yesterday on the commute to work, I heard a story on the radio about a German woman who got stuck in a roundabout, which is a transportation term that literally means, “Our city is too...
Stories vs. Statistics
Last week was vacation week for the Franks family. And like all good vacations, I had time to catch up on a backlog of reading (I also watched Dawn of the Prequel to the Sequel of...
Don’t Just See The Cost
My mom was a wise woman. She always knew the right thing to say and the right time to say it. (That was mainly because I was her favorite child and she loved me more...
Flashback Friday: Get to the Point
My kids’ school system could take a lesson in getting to the point. On snow days or snow-delayed days, we receive an automated 5 AM phone call to let us know the status closings or...
You Do What You Do
Think about the things that end up on your to do list every day: there are emails to answer, phone calls to return, a hundred little tasks that compete for your attention, and probably a...
