History, Real Life, and Faith
My dog Suzie is blind. It seemed to come on quickly. From the time I first questioned whether she might be having a seeing problem to her diagnosis–two days. But in hindsight, it crept up and fooled us for a good three months before the dog ophthalmologist pronounced her stone-cold blind. How could I not have suspected? Why didn’t I…
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I grew up in a community of multi-lingual people, or polyglots. My own mother, born in Sicily, spoke Italian as her first language and occasionally explained things to her mother in her native tongue. Our family babysitter was from Yugoslavia and routinely argued with her husband in various Slavic languages. I went to school with children who spoke Spanish and…
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A girl’s childhood parallels the release of Harry Potter’s books–and how we lived through it!
One of the most important books I read in 2011 was David Platt‘s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Radical has plenty of concepts to chew over, but the one that is sticking with me today has to do with our willingness to come to Jesus and die. I’ve long wondered what it was like to be…
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Vacation Bible School (VBS) is a big deal at our church. We’re not a particularly large Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, regularly worshipping about 325. But we go all out the week after Father’s Day each June and open our church to our community for fun, games, Bible teaching, and great food. We’ve averaged 180 children so far this week and today…
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I’ve been working on my unpublished spiritual memoir today, Loving God without a Label, and thinking about my three visits to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. I traveled to the Eternal City–and the Vatican City–at very different times in my life and I reacted to the seat of Catholicism in very different ways. In 1970, I was fourteen years-old, touring…
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