My senior year in high school I had a parking permit that allowed me to drive to school. Our high school had limited parking and a permit was required, and they were difficult to secure. Suddenly, because I could drive to school, I was very popular in my neighborhood. Every morning, as my car filled […]
Several years ago, an ABC News story featured the work of Julie Exline, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University. Her area of expertise is a bit unusual, as she studies anger, and, specifically, anger at God. Exline’s work discovered that a good many people are mad at God. They are mad because they believe […]
My mom and dad never said so, but I suspect they believed something about my siblings and me. Actually, there were times when they probably believed a lot of things about my siblings and me, and not all of them positive! But one of the things I imagine they believed about us was the difference […]
Here is the text of the message from Sunday, July 29, 2018. “Job: Being A Friend to Those Who Suffer.” Has anyone other than me ever said the wrong thing? Of course you have, because we all have said the wrong thing at some point in life. As someone who has delivered thousands of […]
When I was in college I was often overwhelmed by the amount of reading we were assigned. In Humanities class, for instance, we had about a week to read Crime and Punishment, which seemed to me about 50,000 pages long. Some years after finishing school, I decided to go back and read some of those […]
For many years I thought of myself as being fairly literate when it comes to technology. I’ve realized in more recent years that if I ever was, I am no longer. Part of it may be my impatience at learning new things. I don’t like to read user manuals and I don’t like to spend […]
This morning we come to the third of the four messages from the book of Jonah. Next week ends our series of messages from this very short, but powerful book. Today I want to talk to you about calling. The book of Jonah covers a lot of themes, and one of them is the calling […]
In the 11:00 service today I will not be preaching, as music will fill that time. Because many of the singers and musicians are not available to this service, I am preaching in this service, so you get a bonus message! When I was in seminary, back in the early 80s, one of my professors […]
Some years ago, early in my ministry, a friend of mine one day asked how things were going. It had been one of those weeks that became very busy with everything but what I had planned to do. I am a compulsive list maker, and at the beginning of each week I make a list […]
For much of the summer I am going to offer “summer reruns.” Over the years of my ministry I have rarely reused messages, but since early in the spring I have considered doing so for the summer months. Some of the messages may be from earlier in my ministry here at FCC while others may […]