None of this is very well formed yet…
When I was at Gigantic Denomination Conference for Educators, I attended a workshop on healthy leadership in the church. It was time well spent and I have continued to think about the topic since then.
Here are the speaker’s “ten items for healthy leadership,” some of which are […]

This is SVALA.
$39.99 from IKEA.
Main parts: Solid birch, Solid alder.
2 chairs and 1 table included.
Can be painted or stained.
R and I picked up one of these things when C was a toddler. We liked the simplicity, the affordability, the kid-sizedness of it. We brought it home, set it up in the family room, and proceeded […]

Very good weekend. And I’m feeling upbeat about this week, which I’m hopeful will be the first since early January without illness, inauguration, teacher inservice, out of town trip, work retreat, snow day, or several of the above at once.
However, I do have three evening commitments this week, a number I try to avoid when […]

So I am going to do another 15+3 blast of writing this evening, the first leg of which will be this blog.
Parenting hack, for kids who drag their feet about washing hands for dinner: Tonight before dinner I was using the spray water bottle on a spot on the carpet and on impulse sprayed J’s […]

This is her first unassisted writing.
And… some recent conversations:
Me: C, what do you do when people make fun of you? Does that ever happen?
C: I just ignore them.
Me: How do you do that? I think that’s hard to do.
C: I can hear their voices, I just don’t answer them.
Me: Why do you think people do […]

When we were expecting the divine miss m, I read a few things about how to help an older sibling adjust to the arrival of a new baby. R had a client at the time, an exuberant Argentinian man with a large family, who suggested a way to do the initial meeting of child and […]

Footprints carved in wood, which locals believe were made by a worshipper who prayed at the same spot for decades, are seen at a monastery near Tongren, Qinghai province February 5, 2009. Local Tibetan monks and pilgrims gather to celebrate Monlam, or Great Prayer Festival, one of the most important festivals in Tibetan Buddhism. (REUTERS/Reinhard […]

This blog might have more than its share of warmed-up leftovers and Stouffer’s frozen lasagna this month, as I tend to the deadlines I mentioned in the my previous post.
I am also leading worship for the women’s conferences at God’s Retreat Center in the Texas Hill Country, and am told that the liturgy needs to […]

Through a series of scheduling quirks and pleas for extensions, I have seven writing assignments due in the next month or so. Unfortunately I only have two official days set aside for writing, plus whatever time I can MacGyver into my schedule. One of those days was today.
Simply stated, I can’t afford to procrastinate this […]

In a little while I’ll be heading to the local library for a day of “think time” on a variety of church matters. I scheduled this before the Festival of Illness ‘09, so it seems like a frivolous thing given that I have not been at the church regularly for a while. The tyranny of […]

I haven’t done one of these for a while… just a run-down of how the day and week look for us right now. Boring detail ahead.
R gets up around 6 a.m. I follow close behind, or not so close, depending on how tired I am. By the time we’re finished showering, M and usually J […]

That last post took a lot out of me, so I’m going to cheat and share some words from Barbara Brown Taylor. Check out the whole article at the Christian Century, and I think she has a book out soon.

Sometimes when people ask me about my prayer life, I describe hanging laundry on the line. […]

Thanks for the comments on my previous post, asking whether a pastor could be an agnostic and still be a faithful minister of the gospel.
Before I forget, I hope that Keith, a self-described “antagonostic,” will stop by and say something about Marci’s comment about “standing for something or falling for everything,” because I remember his […]

This morning on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett asked author Mary Doria Russell if she was an agnostic. She said yes and then said jovially, “But the God I almost believe in is the Jewish God!”
This quote and some other stuff I’ve been pondering leads me to ask:
Is it possible for a pastor to be […]