Dear friends, I’m finding it hard to find words this week. What do we say when children practice lockdowns, when a whole city is terrorized by random bombings, when the process of growing up for our young ones seems to be increasingly a process of hardening — not hardening walls and barriers, but making cynical hearts and calculating minds as they get…

Dear friends, This week was table turning Sunday, when we remembered Jesus’ act of defiance in the temple in Jerusalem. Ben and I flipped some small tables over in celebration Sunday morning, but the youth group had already practiced doing this – over and over again. Check out our video, https://flic.kr/p/GPdr1J, and keep watching until you get to the slow-motion portions. We…

Dear friends, I hope you are all doing well and staying warm in this cold snap! I’m glad for the rain, of course, and in some indirect way I’m grateful for the cold, too. Lately whenever I feel cold here in the California winter, I bring to mind the image of my uncle grilling outdoors for our belated Christmas dinner in Albany,…

TALITHA’S TAKE Happy belated Groundhog’s Day! I hope you’re ready for six more weeks of… um… what is this, anyway? If this is winter, I don’t know what spring will be. One week it was so cold that I held back from pruning roses lest they get frost-bitten, and it seems only a few days later I was rushing to get the…

Dear friends, This past weekend I saw a few of you at the Women’s March. Many of you were there, of course, but the crowd was too big for us to find one another. It was huge, it was festive, and there were a lot of funny signs. But in the midst of all the cutesy hats and laugh-worthy slogans, there were…

Dear friends, I’ve been studying the Enneagram for a few years now, but am diving in to study yet again with a few new books and a couple of friends. As you may know if you’ve heard me geeking out about it, the enneagram is a fascinating kind of personality type system which focuses more on inner motivation rather than external behavior.…

Dear friends, Those of you who are friends with me on facebook may have seen the tribute I posted this week for my friend David who died. Some of you may have met him when he visited us in November, or sat with him at the Faith Trio Harvest Dinner. I got news of his death last week from his parents. And…

As we get ready to come close to the mystery of Christmas, there are always some parts of the story that hit home. And it’s amazing how this can change from year to year. In recent years I remember grappling with refugee issues, as children around the world died (and continue to die) in humanitarian crises. The stories of King Herod  at…

Dear friends, At the beginning of the youth group retreat (a week and a half ago, now), it came to pass that we were stopping in our cars and vans, organizing a caravan, most-but-not-quite-all of the way to our cabins in Cazadero… when lo and behold, my own head and a car door met one another in mid-air, and each caught the…

Dear friends, I wrote a sermon about getting through tough times this Sunday, but I didn’t know exactly how tough they were about to be. It was just about twelve hours after I preached that sermon, when firestorms started raging north of us. The smoke woke many of us up in the middle of that night. Our hearts ache for loved ones…