Presby-Musings

I saw an interesting post the other day on one of my social media feeds from an atheist influencer I follow.   That last line might seem confusing to you, and you might be wondering why a Christian pastor would follow an atheist on social media.  The fact is, I follow a lot of atheist influencers, as well as a few atheist groups.  I do so for many reasons, most of which have to do with my own curiosity.   First, I want to hear from people who don't believe the same things I do about faith and religion and to think more deeply about their beliefs and ideas that differ from mine. Secondly, more often than not, I actually agree with them about several things.    For example, their rants against the ills of bad religion and an imaginary, judgmental God who delights in eternal punishment for those who don't measure up are similar to mine.  Years ago, I fired that awful, angry, judgemental God.  But the post that caught my eye said, "There are...

I've had more than a few moments in my life where I felt powerless, and I can tell you that those moments produced some of the most disorienting and difficult feelings I've ever felt.  Most of us have felt that disorientation more often than we like.   Maybe we had to watch a loved one waste away with a terminal illness, a child makes poor choices, a loved one walks away from us, or the promotion we thought was ours go to someone else.  And our powerlessness sometimes extends beyond our own spheres of influence to the world around us.  We feel powerless as our society becomes more divided and less loving.  We feel powerless as we watch the earth despoiled, wars fail to cease, and so much more.  An odd paradox exists in those moments of disorientation that we fight against with all our might.  Because admitting we are powerless is the first step toward finding real peace and acceptance of ourselves and others.  It's also the first step in real...

I was aimlessly scrolling through my Instagram social media feed the other day and came across a video from an interview that the poet and author Maya Angelou did with Oprah Winfrey some years ago.   This quote absolutely wrecked me and filled my eyes with tears.  It was at the end of an already emotional week, but still...  “God loves me. It still humbles me that this force that makes leaves and fleas and stars and rivers and you, loves me. Me, Maya Angelou. It’s amazing. I can do anything. And do it well. Any good thing I can do it. That’s why I am who I am, yes, because God loves me, and I’m amazed at it.”  After I saw this video, I was instantly brought back thirty years to the Sunday morning when I first stepped back into a church after vowing never to do so again five years earlier. For the first time, I heard someone preach a sermon with the underlying message that God loved me.   I remember sitting in the pew in that church with tears streaming...

Sometimes the pain we've experienced is so deep that it feels like we'll never be able to let it go.   Whether it's something done to us or we've suffered from a self-inflicted wound, our souls carry the hurts we've received from betrayals, wrongs, shame, and terrible words long after the blows landed.  And these wounds can keep us from forgiving those who have wronged us and, more importantly, from forgiving ourselves.   Forgiveness, true forgiveness, comes to us slowly, and sometimes it only comes to us when we've grown weary of the fight.  And it is a fight to hold off the spirit of forgiveness, make no mistake.  Every single one of us has a story about how we gave up struggling and decided to forgive someone who wronged us.  At that moment, the relief that washed over us was real and true.   We might second-guess things later, but that initial reaction is always the truest.  We might not even remember why the release of bitterne...

I knew a guy who had been struck by lightning twice.  My dad saw him not long after being struck the second time.  In case you were wondering, he looked like he'd been struck by lightning.  It blew his shoes off, exploded his socks, and left his hair on end with a bunch of burn marks on him.  Kind of what you'd expect.   Then he told my dad that it was the second time in his life that he had been struck by lightning, which prompted me to think at the time, "What are the odds of that?" Your chances of getting struck by lightning are 1 in 15,300. But the odds of getting struck by lightning twice in your lifetime are 1 in 9 million.  I looked it up.  I got to thinking about this guy because I recently wrote a poem about lightning that took an odd turn as I wrote it.  Poetry is like that for me.  I often have no idea where a poem I write will take me, and I'm often surprised by the direction.  Here's the poem:  like lightning the ...

IT’S STILL THE SEASON OF EASTER—CHRIST IS RISEN! Over the next few weeks, we will ask: What does living as Resurrection People mean? How does the Resurrection of Jesus transform our lives and the world?  This study of the lectionary Psalms for the Season of Easter answers the questions and more.  We’ll be connecting these “Resurrection Songs” that we find in the Hebrew Scriptures with songs in our own lives that help us live into the hope we have in Christ in a world that needs a word of hope and a whole lot of grace, peace, and love.  These Resurrection songs remind us of the power of songs in our own lives—the songs we sing or have been sung to us… reminding us who we are.  Let me ask you a question...  What's the best concert you have ever attended?  What made it so amazing?   We have all had different kinds of experiences, but they were so impactful due to a couple of things... It was live.  You were there, and the celebration was public....

So many times in my life, I have been forced to come face-to-face with the fact that our actions have consequences and that sometimes even when we have the best intentions, we do and say things that can reverberate long after we've said or done them.  Each of us knows this instinctively, even though we may not be all that conscious of it.  We've all been hurt before, and the hurts we feel have memory even when the initial pain subsides.   It's like how my knee remembers when I was sixteen and fell hard during a basketball game onto a hard wooden court.  Some days, even in my 54th year of life, I feel the dull ache of that moment when I move my knee a certain way.   We might believe that we have made our peace with the past, but sometimes the wounds we suffered in days long gone resurface when we least expect them.   The trick to living with these painful memories is to allow yourself to be instructed by them rather than let them consume you....

It's still the Season of Easter for several more weeks---at least in the historic Church calendar, which I think we would do well to pay attention to.  These historical rhythms of the Church help those of us who say that we want to follow Jesus to remain focused on the implications of the Christian faith for our lives and the world around us.  I grew up in a faith tradition that never noticed these rhythms.  The Evangelical Christian movement spurned these things in favor of non-traditional, non-liturgical forms of faith and worship.  Interestingly, that's all changing. More and more Christian faith communities who used to turn up their noses at what they assumed to be "high church" practices are discovering them and finding them enriching.  So it's during this Season of Easter that we get the chance to celebrate the Resurrection a bit longer and to actually wrestle with what it means that Jesus has risen.   To that end, I recently read an excellent po...

Sometimes I like to imagine that I can control what other people do. I've seen enough movies about superbeings with psychic powers to fuel those imaginations, so it's a pretty easy daydream to muster.  Can you imagine what that would be like?  Just to get everyone around you to do exactly what you wanted them to do.  I'd never be stuck in traffic ever again. I'd always be first in line at the DMV.   And all of the technicians that give me three-hour windows to fix stuff at my house would narrow their arrival time down to the minute.  But as we all know, that kind of thing is impossible.  We can get the challenging people in our lives to do some  things the way we want them to, but in the end, they are beyond our control.  Sadly, far too many of us spend our lives trying to exert some control over others and even the situations we find ourselves in because of them.   Even though the moments when things go exactly as we hoped are few ...

If you are unfamiliar with the recent surge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) sites like copy.ai or chatgpt , let me enlighten you.  These two are the most well-used sites for producing content through AI on the interwebs.   In a nutshell, you can ask any question, give just about any kind of prompt that you want, and the AI will produce an answer, create an outline for a talk or writing project, give you ideas for drafts on emails, marketing tools, social media posts and all manner of things.  A whole cottage industry is being created to determine if the content you are reading is produced by AI or a human being.   This is important for teachers, university professors, and the like trying to figure out whether the term paper, research project, etc., they read was written by the student or by a chatbot.   Conversely, a cottage industry is being created to get around the software used to discover these things.  And so it goes.  I've been p...

One of my favorite things to do when I travel is walk the streets of whatever city or town I visit. Walking a city is the best way to get a feel for it, gather its energy, and find surprising things.  When I lived in downtown Chicago for several years, I would spend hours walking (not in winter), taking in the city's sights, sounds, and smells.   I discovered fantastic art galleries, restaurants, out-of-the-way places, and shortcuts to all my favorite haunts through grim alleys that opened up to wonder.  This past summer, I spent nearly two weeks in Edinburgh and walked daily for miles through the city streets.  It was magical.  Every day I was there, I discovered something new and exciting.  Walking through a city, you discover many things that aren't on the regular tourist maps.  You see the city itself in all of its beautiful ugliness.   Nevena Pascaleva is an author, photographer, and artist living in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-la...

I don't mind traveling by airplane; I rather enjoy it, despite some slight anxiety when there's turbulence.  I enjoy flying because there's little to do once you're in the air.  You have few choices as to how to occupy your time.  You can read, write, listen to music, sleep, or (on many airlines) you can watch a movie.  These are all things that I love to do, so it works out.  What I don't love to do on a flight is strike up conversations with my seatmates.  As hard as it is for some of you to believe, I'm an introvert.  I'm what might be classified as an "extroverted introvert," I suppose.  This means that I can seem like an extrovert when you encounter me in most situations involving interactions with others, and I do enjoy those moments.  I also crash afterward and need some time to regroup.  So when I have a chance on an hours-long flight to tune out the world, bury myself in a good book, write, journal, and listen to music while doi...

How often have you heard someone say to you, "Just let go of the past"? I've heard that particular phrase scores of times and probably said it to others as many times as I've heard it.  It's a true and valuable piece of advice, to be sure.  If you live in the past, you lose the opportunity to truly be present in the present, and the future is too cloudy and uncertain to be hopeful.  But to totally disregard the past is not helpful either.   When we say that we are "letting go of the past," it's not a license to excuse yourself or others for what has happened without seeking to learn from whatever you've done or what has been done to you.   Letting go of the past means releasing yourself from shame and allowing yourself to move forward in a new way.  Letting go of the past means you don't have to keep paying for your mistakes or the abuse, trauma, or degradation you may have experienced.  It doesn't mean you don't acknowledge that what...

When I was a kid, I used to have this recurring dream where I was in a clearing in a forest, and the world was in slow motion.  I saw leaves slowly falling to the ground and insects buzzing placidly around me.  And the air itself was thick.  It felt like I could feel it surrounding me, and it was more difficult to move through.  I wasn't panicked, though.  It felt wonderful.  I could breathe more deeply, and what I breathed in smelled like flowers and trees.  That clearing was beautiful.  I can see it still.  And sometimes, I will have that dream again, though not as much as when I was young.  Stumbling into that clearing in my dream, I would think to myself while dreaming and after waking, "This must be heaven."  There have been times when I have stepped into clearings like the one from my dream or into other kinds of spaces that felt different.   One of those spaces was on the steps of a church in Colorado Springs, where...

Do you ever have days when you think that, for many of us, there are far fewer days in front of us than behind us? When I was young, I never thought about things like that.  I felt invincible.  I felt like I had all the time in the world to do and be what I hoped and dreamed I would.  If I ever contemplated my mortality, I soon buried it in fleeting moments because it seemed so far away.  But at some point, you reach a certain age when you start thinking about things like time and how we're all running out of it at an alarming rate.   And still, something within us longs for more time, more experience, and anything that can aid us in our search for meaning and fulfillment.   In these moments, we sometimes wonder what might have been if we'd taken different turns at the crossroads we've faced.  We wish we'd done more, said more, accomplished more.   The Psalmist who wrote Psalm 144 put it like this:  All we are is a puff of air;...