Leaving Our Arks
We have been waiting—haven’t we?—for that bow in the sky that says it’s safe to return to worship, that we can take off our masks, and sing, and hug. It’s pretty clear we aren’t there yet.
View ArticleMuscle Memory
Muscle memory is a great metaphor for how we're going to fumble, stumble and use new social practices as we return to in-person church gatherings.
View ArticlePost-Pandemic Perceived Rejection
Our anxiety about germs and viruses is countered by habit, and by our bodies’ understandable longing for physical interaction.
View ArticleThe Fickle Weight of 'Exile'
Exile isn’t just about a pandemic. It’s about ongoing concern for mental health that we see more clearly today; mental illness can feel like a kind of exile. And United Methodists have a lot of exile...
View ArticleMining the Negative Space
When our attention gets pulled again and again to the things, the crises, the worries, it is so easy to miss what lies between them -- the negative spaces that can hold meaning.
View ArticleRight in Our Midst
As we come to the season of Advent, we’re invited to remember we inhabit a landscape that is always more than we can see.
View ArticleThe Glorious Holiness of Time
Living to witness the movement of the calendar from last year to the new one marks something real. A new year that will hold things stretches out ahead of us, for better or worse.
View ArticleUnimaginable Days
In these early days of war after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the plight of Ukrainians who must decide between living and staying in their country reminds us all how fragile our lives truly are.
View ArticleThe Complicated Whether and How of Touching
Like everything else about church, the coronavirus pandemic has changed how we approach hugging and touching one another during worship and other gatherings.
View ArticleSacred Invitation
“How is it with your soul?” John Wesley famously asked. I hadn’t realized mine had become so frayed. This author had been carrying the weight of huge questions, matters that belong to God, as if they...
View ArticleWhen We No Longer Know What to Do
Not knowing isn’t a crisis; it’s a clue. Those things—the ones we don’t know how to do but put them on our list anyway—must be ones we're feeling a call to pursue, or else they wouldn’t be there.
View ArticleFrom Exile to Hope
The writing team preparing the Iowa Conference's spiritual resource "Abiding ..." discerned that, while we still may be journeying through exile, it's time to turn our vision to hope.
View ArticleDay One on the Job, Two Years In
The Rev. Lee Roorda Schott, one of those who started their current ministries in 2020, draws hope for the future from church experts who invite pastors and other church workers to consider themselves...
View ArticleThe Silence in Between
It was easy to write about exile. We were all feeling it. Shared agony, and confusion, and frustration are fodder for abundant words. Hope is different. Hope birthed is a long way from hope realized....
View ArticleWelcome, Welcome, Welcome
The shifting, changing nature of our emotions is something we could take advantage of. But do we? No. Instead, when an emotion comes up, we fuel it with our thoughts, and what should last 1-1/2 minutes...
View ArticleSkillful Strings and Loud Shouts
Rev. Lee Roorda Schott's personal code – 333 – refers to Psalm 33, especially its third verse, which instructs God's people to praise and rejoice with skillful playing and loud voices.
View ArticleWhat Little I Can Do
Each voice lifted up against injustice or harm feels so small. It turns out that what each of us can do, though, as little as it may seem, is not nothing.
View Article[Your name here]
How important is it that we know one another by our true names? If scripture is to be believed, it was crucially important when the Risen Christ called Mary by her name.
View ArticleLaziness, Sometimes
When we apply John Wesley's teaching on keeping busy to today, with our 24-7 busy-ness and instantaneous accessibility of messages and information and distractions, tends to reinforce some of our worst...
View ArticleGod’s Calling. Again.
Do we know what it means to be called? If you’re a layperson, do you describe yourself that way? “Called”? The Church uses that language for all of us, clergy and lay.
View ArticleThe Light We Almost Miss
What does it take to notice life's simple joys and wonders, to name their belovedness, day by day by shortening day? Wouldn’t we be healthier, in mind and spirit, if we did?
View ArticleAbiding in Hope
Moving from the exile of the past few years, we may not yet be fully in hope, but we're getting there. All of us have known loss, and yet most of us are still standing in resilience. Our hope as...
View ArticleWinning through…Flossing?
Persons in recovery know the power—the symbolic win—of managing to complete that thing that you’d rather not. That win might help you stay on track to not do the thing you know you have to stay away from.
View ArticleRevisiting Our Holy Words
We’ve been shaped (mis-shaped) by language that unvaryingly invites us to regret rather than to reorient. What if our Bibles showed us a bold Jesus who bursts on the scene with an invitation to utterly...
View ArticleAbout Time
In daily life, we don’t worry about our clocks not keeping time precisely with the sun. And that slippage is not that different than the truth we have all experienced: precision is the exception where...
View ArticleLike a Chain Restaurant
What qualities does a local church share with popular chain restaurants? How should those qualities be adapted to a faith setting?
View ArticleSomeone Else's House
In a culture where home ownership is highly valued and often regarded as a mark of successful adulting, it’s peculiar—and somewhat unsettling—to find oneself in someone else’s house. We’re all in...
View ArticleThen.
Have you experienced such a “then”? A time when you were at the end of your rope and you found God ministering to you the exact thing you needed? when you were full of reasons and excuses and God...
View ArticleNMB/NMP
Perhaps the simplest of all the answers, as we try to figure out which observed problems ought to prompt our response, is to remember to ask: “Is this MY problem? Is it even any of my business?”...
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