Six years ago one of my kids (then age 12) went on an all-youth mission trip with Strawbridge United Methodist Church. She spent the week cleaning debris out of yards and repairing and painting houses. It changed her life.
It’s not that any of the clean up work generalized to her personal life, because the floor of [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Mission Tripping
Posted in Uncategorized on June 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Lenten Study #5 Resurrection
Posted in Uncategorized on March 12, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Ed is dying from AIDS related wasting. If you picture in your mind those grisly photographs of people who have starved to death in other parts of the world, you get the idea. There isn’t much left of his body. Ed is bedridden, but he likes to be wheeled out on to the porch at [...]
Bleeding
Posted in Uncategorized on March 4, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I listened to an Evanescence CD all the way to church this morning. I love their music. The band mixes driving rock and symphonic barkgrounds and Amy Lee’s amazing vocals with haunting lyrics. My kids call it “Emo” music, but it’s a lot like the stuff I grew up with in the 70’s, only more [...]
Lenten Study #4 Good Friday
Posted in Uncategorized on February 27, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Edna had arrived without any teeth. That’s the first thing that I noticed about our new patient at Bering Omega Hospice. For many years, Edna’s known address had been “under the bridge at St. John’s.” St. John’s Methodist Church feeds homeless people, so I suppose that had been a strategic location for Edna. We don’t know much [...]
Lenten Study #3: Maundy Thursday
Posted in Uncategorized on February 20, 2008 | 2 Comments »
We went to a middle school track meet the other night; an event that I consider the secular equivalent of a visit to Limbo. It involves a lot of purgatorial waiting around for something to happen, and there is very little information about when you can leave. It was a four hour meet, and our [...]
Lenten Study #2: Self-discipline
Posted in Uncategorized on February 13, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I am trying to muster the self-discipline to write about self-discipline. This Lenten study is titled “The Power of Words” and I must say that the words “self-discipline” have very little appeal for me at the moment. They tend to conjure up concrete images of self-denial; of refraining from eating that second piece of cheesecake [...]
Lenten Study #1: Penitence
Posted in Uncategorized on February 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »
When I was a kid, I used to marvel at the Catholic kids when they arrived at school on Ash Wednesday. Little sooty crosses were on their foreheads, often smudged into some other unrecognizable shape or simply joining forces with the other dirt that tends to cling to kids. I was intrigued, but also thankful [...]
