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One of the things that any pastor of a congregation has to do is visit people where they live. The church I serve has a number of folks who are either in nursing homes or assisted living. Some pastors love visiting with people.

I've been thinking for some time now that I would like to learn a little Spanish. There are a number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in our community, and a Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist congregation meets in our sanctuary on Saturday morning. Some of the congregation members are fluent in English, but not all of them. It has piqued my language-learning curiosity.

Divestment? From Israel? That's the rumbling issue that's raising eyebrows, as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) holds our biannual meeting di tutti meetings. For all the kerfuffle, I don't know that what the Presbyterian Church is considering can even be meaningfully described as "divestment." Sure, there are folks out there advocating for that approach, but that's not what's being done.

At lunch with a friend recently, I asked him about his first few years in campus ministry. It's been wonderful, he said. "Slow, patient, immensely rewarding. Frustrating. Growing." Like me, my friend's work on campus is of the church-planting kind. We started talking about learnings. I mentioned my from-time-to-time loneliness. 

Every so often, usually between 5 and 9 pm on a Saturday night when I am lurching toward the finish line of another sermon (or grinding my teeth in frustration at the sermon that just won’t come together), a terrifying thought pops into my head.  All of a sudden it occurs to me what a laughable, horrifyingly presumptuous thing it is to get up in front of a group of people and presume to speak on behalf of or about God. This sounds just a touch melodramatic or self-important, I know. 

Does the study of theology require more skin, more personal involvement, than other types of study? Case study one: Claire is a second-year university student. She has one optional subject and spots a summer school program called Bible and Popular Culture. She has a cousin who grew up religious and it makes for awkward pauses whenever the family get together. She enrolls in Bible and Popular Culture, hoping to gain an easy credit and to help her talk with the "religious" side of her family.

A couple of weeks ago, funeral director Caleb Wilde wrote a blog post about who to seek out when dealing with grief. His basic advice: find a therapist before you seek out your pastor. The reasoning goes that therapists, with their training in the psychological aspects that arise in times of grief, are better qualified than clergy to deal with things like depression. I agree.

It wasn't a particularly rushed morning, several Sundays ago. I'd finished up the sermon, then putzed around with it for a few minutes as I always do before printing it up on a Sunday morning.

As a child, I was taught that prayer was talking to God, but because God was God prayer came with a lot of rules. Rules like 1. Always start with thanksgiving. 2. Always confess your sins after that.

My family did some major remodeling of our house over the last three or four years. I think we are finally done. A friend asked me if it was a wise investment: would we ever see the market value of the place exceed what we put into it? No, it's unlikely that the market value of the house will ever surpass what we've spent on it, but, as I said to my friend, we don't really own it anyway, we're just stewards of it for a time.

There is a feeling that comes over me when I'm hiking. Even in the extremely short post-operative shuffles that I’ve been taking as I recover from having surgery several weeks ago. I feel connected. I feel literally grounded to creation and the creator that flows through each of us—butterfly, blade of grass, snake, and human. Sometimes I pause in my hiking and just sit for a while and take in the sounds, smells, and images around me.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came shortly after one of the first worship services I led as a pastor. One of the parish members came up to me after worship one week and said, "You didn't leave enough room." "What do you mean?" I asked. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Yassas! That's Greek for hello, goodbye, cheers, "to you!" And a makeshift "thank you" for those (like me) who can't quite manage efkharisto (eff-car-ee-STOH), the official Grecian "thank you." On a recent trip to Greece, every time I tried to say a proper efkharisto I was rewarded with puzzled looks and general incomprehension.

Several years ago, I realized that, for a long time, I had been fighting back tears whenever I would see children run gleefully around a playground or hear them squeal with delight as they played, or notice their wonder over wildflowers, squirrels, and birdsong. It would happen, too, when I listened to a choir of children sing at the top of their lungs without embarrassment or when I saw a kids’ soccer team take the field with buoyant energy.

There's wisdom in putting biblical storytelling at the heart of worship. We are formed by stories. I'm fond of the line by the poet Muriel Rukeyser embedded in the street outside the New York Public Library, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."  When you think about what makes up you, it's not the cells of your body, it's more likely a story of some kind. 

Much has been said about perils of social media and the excessive use of smart phones. I've chimed in once or twice in the past. The latest rant has come via the clip "Look Up." I agree with much in the assessment of our obsessive phone culture and admit my own tendency to focus more on my phone than my surroundings from time to time. Smart phones and social media feed a lack of attentiveness in relationships and a general distraction in everyday life we’d all do well to avoid. But I'm also uneasy with these repeated guilt-inducing tirades against the current state of society's use of technology.

At a church leaders' retreat last month, we talked about having an I don't do list as a way of making time for sacred pauses in life and ministry. The things we don't do make it possible to do some other things. The things we say No to allow us to say Yes to other things. So one pastor said, "I don’t answer the phone at home after 8 p.m."