WORLDS ARE FORMING

Not what I thought this summer would hold.

My aunt Denise died unexpectedly on June 17th here in Spokane.  I hadn't seen her for several months, even though we lived three miles apart.  It was a privilege to serve her and my family during that crazy week.  I find it hard to believe that a month has passed since that week she died, a week which is both foggy and vivid in my mind.

This picture was taken last summer on a liberating trip Denise took by herself to my Dad and Mom's farm.  I now hold memories from her visit really close.

I was out reading at a coffee shop today when Frederick Buechner's words in The Sacred Journey struck me, words pertaining to his experience of his father's death.

"God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say.  Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of your years, but often it takes many years and many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is.  Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus is alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing." (41)

I miss Denise a lot - her laugh, her voice, her loyalty, herself, and am grateful to God to have known her.  I appreciate Buechner naming the fact that meaning changes even as we change, that as we try to figure out this loss of Denise, we will be learning, we will be changed. 

So the task now is to continue to look for Denise's legacy in my life and in the life of our family.

Psalm 145:8-9

God's Grace to Me!

Tonight we had our Senior portrait, Senior Dinner, and Senior Worship Service. Kind of an intense and choppy night.  The different parts of the night were great, but didn't necessarily fit well together.  In any event, the beautiful people in the picture above have been faces of God's grace to me throughout the past three years.  I am so grateful for them.  (Look at this, from the first week of class in 2004...lets just say we've grown up...QUITE A BIT!)

Dr. Blount's charge included these words to us as we follow God's call into ministry:

IF YOU AREN'T AFRAID, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. 

Indeed.

My future feels like this...

 

RESURRECTION!

JESUS, the very thought of thee
  With sweetness fills the breast;
But sweeter far thy face to see,
  And in thy presence rest.

O Hope of every contrite heart,
  O Joy of all the meek,
To those who ask, how kind thou art!
  How good to those who seek!

Jesus, our only joy be thou;
  As thou our prize wilt be;
In thee be all our glory now,
  And through eternity.

        -Bernard of Clairvaux

Good Friday and Blades of Glory.

Last night: A moving Good Friday service at the Princeton University chapel followed by a spontaneous viewing of the extremely random Blades of Glory.  Talk about contrasts!

Good Friday.

What a mysterious and significant day for the Christian church. I too easily drink my cup of coffee, check my email, and then forget about it...but it is Good Friday.  Something happened on this day.  God was up to something big. The song that has haunted me every Good Friday for the past few years has been a live recording of the old gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson singing Calvary.  You can buy it on iTunes.  It is both simple and profound.

Calvary, Calvary.
Calvary, Calvary.
Surely He died on Calvary.
Can't you hear him Calling his Father?
Can't you hear him Calling his Father?
Calvary, Calvary.
Surely, o surely
Surely, o surely
He died on Calvary.

Ringing in my mind.

What has sounded cliche to me for some time is once again emerging as a good and deep conviction of mine.  I am grateful for these words.

"I am confident of this: that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."
                                                                            -Paul.  Philippians 1:6

A Sermon on Psalm 133.

Well, I finally preached in Miller Chapel. I remember when I first got to Princeton three years ago, I thought it was such a huge deal.  Now that I've done it, I know that it is a unique setting, and it is just another place to proclaim God's word.  Also, in the middle of it, I had this conversation with myself, "Wait.  Am I really up here right now?  Yes?  This is fun."

I am so grateful to have had friends leading worship with me, and to look out in the congregation and see the faces of people I know and love so deeply, people who embody Psalm 133 to me.  I felt God's presence throughout the service, and am grateful.

I am glad to be done with it!  Wore my new suit, new tie, new shoes...and I was so sweaty by the end.  Man.  If you would like to see an order of service, click here .  If you would like to read my sermon, how about clicking here ?  If you would like to listen to the whole service, get it here! Parts of it are quieter than others...but keep listening!

How good and pleasant it is when sisters and brothers live together in unity!

I Love Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich is intense!  I've continued to read Life Together as I prepare for this Tuesday's meditation in chapel.  His vision for Christian community is a high calling, all focused on Jesus, learning to be for Christ and for the other.  Would that I would gain such a vision!

"Christian community is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.  The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it."  (Bonhoeffer: Life Together, 30)

Preach, Dietrich.