By Amy Butler Those who don’t really care about the suffering of others may be excused. But anybody who feels they must comment from the sidelines on an occasion of human pain ought to have some training in pastoral care….
The discipline of failure
By Amy Butler It’s Lent again, and that means everybody is talking about what they are giving up. Many of us have been gearing up to make the most of the liturgical season, so much so that I felt a…
Dunking in the dark
By Amy Butler Millions of dollars are spent every year to purchase advertising time during the most-watched sports event of the entire year. I am no advertising expert, but I imagine that marketing executives work long and hard to produce…
A hopeful but scary future
By Amy Butler Like a lot of people I know, I am up at night sometimes thinking, wondering and worrying about the viability of the church as we know it. I’m not worried about the gospel. I’m pretty sure the…
A pastor’s life
By Amy Butler The start of the New Year is always a good time to ponder the deeper issues of life, and lately I’ve been ruminating over whether being a pastor and having a life are two mutually exclusive ideas….
The season of getting busy
By Amy Butler It could very well be just me, but I usually find the post-Christmas haze to be a little bit of a let-down. After all the excitement and anticipation of Christmas Day, I am never quite sure what…
Talking points and tragedy
By Amy Butler There are moments when words fail us, even those of us who wrestle words to a page for a living. Last week was one of those times. What words can possibly console the parents of 20 little…
God with skin on
By Amy Butler One of my spiritual mentors used to remark around Christmas every year about how amazing it is that God decided it would be a good idea to come to earth as a human. “Jesus was God —…
Thankful once a year
By Amy Butler When Thanksgiving and Advent are back-to-back, per usual, there’s hardly time to clear the turkey off the table to make room for the Advent wreath before the first candle should be lit. Most years we scramble back…
Joy, joy, joy
By Amy Butler Lately, that vacation Bible school song “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart” has been running around in my head, and I can’t get it out. Remember the song? We learned it, I…
Confessions of a sitting duck
By Amy Butler The expression “like sitting ducks” seems apropos for those of us on the East Coast last week. We knew for several days that a huge storm was headed our way, and so we waited, glued to news…
When callings and choir robes collide
By Amy Butler The other day I was remembering my first involvement in a church as an independent adult. My first grown-up church was a big, suburban congregation with a fancy building and lots of fun programming for college students….