As I watch the news and await the impact of Hurricane Matthew on South Carolina, I think back to the parents who were in the Victorian Lakes Mobile Home Community during the flood last year and the stories they told about the police coming and knocking on their door telling them to pack a bag and …
It’s been a year since Columbia was devastated with a historic flood. It isn’t that we weren’t warned that the rain was coming, it’s that no one who lived in famously hot Columbia could imagine what that amount of rainfall could do to homes, businesses, and lives. Just last week I took Waylon to our …
It was 2:30 a.m., Sam and I looked at each other and said, “We’ve got to figure out something different.” We had both lost count how many times we had been up, ping ponging from our 6 year old to our 10 month old. They were waking each other up back and forth, sharing space. …
I didn’t grow up in a worship tradition that included Prayers of the People. Perhaps it was because the congregation was so large that ministers and worship leaders didn’t know how to manage and plan for the time it would take for people to utter prayers before God and their community of faith. Instead I …
I was recently at my parents’s house and found my box of awards. You know the one I mean: the one that has all those participation ribbons and those good works and the more special awards, the ones you worked really hard to receive and tried to act like you didn’t care if you got …
Sometimes sermon prep rocks you to your core… There are 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space in America, or more than 7 square feet for every, man, woman and child in the country. (An American Dilemma) The official poverty rate is 14.5%, meaning 45.3 million people in the US live in poverty, up by …
I can’t help but wonder if perhaps Ben understands better than I do. When we pull aside the curtain of privilege and systematic discrimination, surely we will find the light. Light that offers challenging self-examination, light that offers hope, and light that offers healing, but not until we admit that we have been hiding behind …
I found myself running the stop sign run at my parents’ house this weekend. It’s uphill to the end of their street where a stop sign sits at the crossroads to the main road. As I tried to convince my legs and lungs that I had done this run many, many times before, I remembered the …
This Saturday as part of ministrieslab, we partnered with Resurrections that has been popping up on Saturdays in downtown Columbia to serve a midday meal for fourteen years. We knew it was going to be hot and we knew that there were going to be a lot of people in need. We also knew we …
As we have worked with the community at Transitions through ministrieslab, I have been struck by the number of times I have come to worship and have heard, “Are we having chapel? I wasn’t sure if you were coming.” At first, there was a part of me that bristled at the comment. Have I not been …
