Love Not Fear

I probably don't know the names of the people who made the biggest difference in your life. You probably don't know the names of the people who made the biggest difference in mine. I do know the name of the president of the United States. I know the name of some movie stars. I know the names of some sports stars. They stand out, and they do great things. But lots of people do great things, and they don't all stand out. Most of them don't, because they're too busy helping people to worry about standing out. I know the names of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, the lead actors in the movie The Sound of Music. And I remember one of my favorite scenes in the movie, where Andrews's Maria and Plummer's Captain look into each others eyes in the gazebo, in the moonlight. They look incredibly beautiful. I don't know the name of the camera operator, the lighting technician, the set designer, the hair and makeup people, or the cinematographer, all of wh...

The page began when I was teaching a youth Sunday school class. We'd often get into deep discussions, and we'd often run out of time, or we'd need to do some more research to help us form our thoughts better. I thought that having a site like this would help. I also thought it would be less intimidating (and more practical) for young people to point their friends at a website instead of inviting them to worship. The website they could visit when they wanted, and spend as much time as they wanted there, while worship is only at a specific time in a specific place. Well, that didn't work out as I had planned. I then re-purposed this page to be a kind of "news and information" page because our church website at the time was very static and difficult to update. That didn't work very well either, mostly because, as it turns out, there wasn't that much news to report. My church used to ask me to preach about once or twice a year when our pa...

I have far fewer opportunities these days to discuss God in the kind of depth and richness that I enjoy. That doesn't mean that I haven't been praying or doing Bible study (I currently teach a discussion-based adult Sunday school class), but it seems that many of the discussions I've been in of late have been very constrained, either by time or subject. So, I've decided to "pivot" this page as a means for me to get these considerations out of my head and more available for others should they find them of use.