History, Real Life, and Faith
A dozen of us spent five hours sifting through the ashes of a friends’ home following the Valley Fire in Lake County, California. Four weeks after the fire roared through the neighborhood and destroyed everything around it in minutes, we descended on an ash-filled house. As explained here and here, our task was to clear a cement pad that used to…
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We traveled to Cobb Mountain following 2016’s Valley Fire to dig through an ash-filled house. A sobering, dirty job for friends. Some eighty of us gathered at the Middletown Lion’s Club in the morning. After being given general directions and specific supplies, our leader spoke to us about our “mission” that morning. “You’re here to help, of course,” a fire…
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We drove out to Cobb Mountain on Saturday to work on the site of a house that burned down last month. A dozen of us from St. Mark Lutheran Church arrived at the burned-down home of a church member. I hadn’t been up to Lake County since the Valley Fire. I’d never glimpsed a scene quite like it before. Middletown…
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This is a story about heeding the Holy Spirit‘s direction. People ask all the time, “how do you know God is telling you to do something?” This is an example of what happened to me. And since my friend wrote about how it affected her, you get “both sides of the tapestry.” My friend Hillary lives in Sicily where she…
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October 12, 2015, marked the 100th anniversary of British nurse Edith Cavell’s execution by a German firing squad fifteen months after the start of World War I. Hailed as a saintly British nurse-martyr by some and called a victim of the British propaganda machine by others, Cavell’s life and the reason for her death was more nuanced than that. Many…
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Do you have someone in your life who can say “no” to you and you’ll accept it? Why not? Are you never wrong? Passages in the Bible admonition us to love one another and to speak the truth in love. Sometimes that means saying “no,” and it’s important we all have someone who we’ll listen to and either reconsider, or…
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