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Orlando and Repentance

It’s tempting to remain silent in in the wake of the violence in Orlando. It’s also wrong.We need the kind of silence which makes room for prayer and grief. Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan was right to call for a moment of silence when the House...

Music is Everywhere

Music is everywhere. The creation itself pulses with pizzazz and praise; the universe dances to the jazz of joy. We can hear the music in the trumpeting cry of an elephant, the playful greeting of a dolphin, and the upward call of a soaring hawk. It’s in the contented...

To Play and Pray

For the last few days, I’ve had the chance to take long walks on Holden Beach, and I’ve been enchanted by the interactions of parents with their children: a mother gingerly wading out into the ocean with a baby girl resting in her arms; another mother teaching her...

God Sings Hank Williams

Hank Williams asked one of the profoundest questions I’ve heard: “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart?”  He plaintively sang:   The more I learn to care for youThe more we drift apart.Why can’t I free your...

Being Constrained Doesn’t Mean Having to be Stuck

My post on the Center for Healthy Churches websiteOne of the most significant “leadership” books I’ve read in the last couple of years is A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages and Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Wiley, 2016). ...

The Heart of Being

A wise woman of the Spirit, Evelyn Underhill, claimed that most of us spend our lives “conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, we are kept in perpetual unrest.”To want. Sometimes we can name our desires: friendship,...

Teach Us to Care and Not to Care

Like many cities, Asheville has a “Before I Die . . .” wall–a large chalkboard with multiple spaces for people to write some of their hopes for the future.  Since the wall is on the path I take for most of my downtown walks, I read them several days each...

Meeting on the Common Ground of our Vulnerability

To say the obvious: We live in a time of upheaval and confusion. In response, many people want the church to insulate them from ambiguity and shelter them from anxiety; they want it to be a place where hard questions don’t intrude and disagreements don’t disturb....

Creation Groans and So Do We

Over the last few months, I’ve often traveled north on I-26/US 23 into the broken heart of Eastern Kentucky’s coal country.The land looks weary. There are gashes in the hillsides which huge machines have stripped bare not only of coal but of topsoil; peaks blasted...