Just as my eyes fluttered open, Joanna looked over the side of my gurney and said words on which my life pivoted: “Dr. Steckler said you won’t die from this.” Even through the fog of anesthesia, I realized that brief…
A Matrix Thanksgiving: The red pill, the blue pill or… ?
“We’re thankful God protected us.” When I was in seminary in the early 1990s, Mount Pinatubo erupted, devastating Luzon, the largest and most populated island in the Philippines. In the 1980s, I twice had served as a summer missionary on…
When the system is based on comparison, won’t someone always be ‘more blessed’ and ‘less blessed’ than another?
Walking into the room, I saw a 3-year-old with a cast on his leg sitting in his hospital bed surrounded by plush Hulk, Captain America and Spider-Man toys. Sitting next to the bed was a weary-looking mom, who welcomed me…
Blessings of the pandemic
I know, what is she thinking?! In the season of giving thanks, let’s look back at the last two years and acknowledge that some of the changes, unbelievably, resulted in gratitude. The list will likely surprise us. I’ll go first…
Blessed to be a blessing, globally
“Blessed to be a blessing.” I’ve heard it a million times. You have, too, if you go to the kind of church that recycles catchy slogans (which is most churches). Sure, it’s a cliche. But I like it. Because it…
The blessing of provocation
Theological education has been my life’s work, and it has been a joyful and traumatic pursuit at three schools: Southern Seminary, Central Seminary, and now United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. I would consider myself blessed to have labored…
Blessing is naming what is true
“You are so blessed.” I hear this statement sometimes, usually in places where my bandwidth for seeing the sacred is about gone. In the grocery store, when my four little goofballs are hanging off a cart or screaming, I don’t…
Blessed by life’s diversions
This is the sixth in a November series produced by BNG on what it means to be “blessed,” a word so flippantly used that it often loses meaning. My life has been marked by a series of diversions that, looking…
Seeing mortality as blessing
Memories have become capricious things as I approach my seventh decade on Planet Earth. Conversations I could swear happened just a few days ago actually stretch back 20 years or more, yet there are days when I can’t remember whether…