I was baptized as a baby … some 53 years ago. I am too old to act on the thought now, but in my younger days I often considered getting “re-baptized”.  I wanted to be baptized on the basis of my own choice. I wanted to make my own profession of faith.  Over the years I heard a few pastors say that getting re-baptized was not a problem, but most seemed to stand firmly against it.  Your baptism was “a one-time thing” and is unrepeatable. It seems funny to me now, but I don’t remember anyone trying to make a…

In his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams describes a medical issue he had in the early 2000’s. It caused him to lose his voice entirely.  Eventually he was diagnosed with a rare condition called spasmodic dysphonia.  For two years he was silent. He was told there was no cure.  These days he spends nearly an hour speaking solo on his podcast each day. Literally 7 days a week.  His attitude about what he was going to do with his healing is what caught my eye: “I decided that after I cured myself,…

My first post on this blog was written on November 7th, 2010. It was a few weeks after I returned from my first trip to Haiti. Melissa and I were feeling the call to move our family there. I wasn’t sure what to do next, but I knew I needed to lighten the load. I had to get rid of some stuff. So I decided that each day I was going to find something around the house to either give away, throw away, or sell. And I would document it on a daily basis.  It made for an interesting ongoing…

Maybe even better than re-living all my favorite novelty songs from my childhood on Spotify was discovering some songs I had never heard before by some of my favorite artists – many long dead and gone. Allan Sherman died young – 48, I think. You might not recognize the name but maybe you remember his most famous song – the one about an unhappy boy at summer camp: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah. (If you haven’t heard of it, where have you been? It’s got its own Wikipedia page!) It made it to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 List in…

Since I am primarily working from home now, I recently went looking for something to break up the silence of the house.  (I mean besides Sugar and Ginger’s incessant barking at anything that moves outside the living room window.)  I was excited to see there was a free version of Spotify, as I had always assumed it was a paid app.  There was one outcome of checking out Spotify that should not have surprised me: I went down a music rabbit hole.  When I was a kid – I have no recollection how it started – my musical genre of…

Come Ash Wednesday, Melissa and I find ourselves wishing we were part of a church that was a bit more … liturgical. Did the modern American church have to jettison ALL tradition in order to be cool and contemporary? And out of all the seasons on the Christian calendar, why did we preserve Advent alone? (And am I being overly critical or does it often feel like Advent is just the churchy equivalent to “only 4 more shopping weeks until Christmas”?) Anyway, it would be nice to see an Ash Wednesday service on our church calendar, but there isn’t one.…

I have spent the last month fretting over a research paper for one of my classes. The prof is a tough grader and it has been a long time since I wrote a 10 to 12 page paper. In recent days, I have made massive changes to the structure of the whole thing – I go round and round on the order of the sections. I had made a commitment to myself that I would go back and look at the professor’s comments on my previous papers to get an idea of what to improve for this one. But that…

The city of Berea gets a short but significant shout out in the book of Acts. (17:10-15) The people of Berea are contrasted with those of Thessalonica where Paul and Silas had just stopped to “reason with them from Scripture” about the Christ.  The Thessalonians had listened – and quite a few people had been persuaded – but ultimately … surprise! … a group of leaders had stirred up the crowds and run the disciples out of town. The Bereans, on the other hand, “received the message with great eagerness” AND “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what…

It is estimated that the Apostle Paul spent about 5 and a half years of his 35 years of missionary service in prison. Locked up and awaiting trial. His first imprisonment is alongside Silas in the city of Philippi. The two of them get into trouble when Paul casts a fortune-telling spirit out of a slave girl. Her masters are not happy over the loss of income.  So they stir up the crowd and the local magistrates against Paul and Silas. The two men are severely beaten and then shackled in a cell in the heart of the local jail. …