BLOG

The twelve disciples of Jesus are a fascinating group of guys. We’ll do a study some day on the character and accomplishments of this rag-tag group of diverse men who were chosen by Jesus to turn the world up-side down. But in my Bible reading this morning, there is one thing that stood out to me about these guys. While they are quite the assortment of personalities and backgrounds, there appears to be one characteristic that brought them all together.     When Jesus called,

I was totally blown away by a news story out of Massachusetts this last week. Boston, of course, was at the center of our nation’s birth and many of our most outspoken founders came from there. The old city still has many of its early buildings where so many decisions were made that led to the founding of this country and the American system that we tend to take for granted. If you visit downtown Boston, it’s like visiting a city-wide museum.     That is why I was even more a

“Do you want help? Do you want help?” I often ask those two questions in counseling.     I will sometimes follow with something like this, “Or do you just want someone to fix your current crisis? Because real help is going to require changes in your life and the choices you are making that have led to this crisis.”     When a couple is looking for marriage help, they want their husband or wife fixed. Parents want their kids fixed. People who are feeling guilty because of the

I had a meeting downtown today, which took me into the thrilling Chicago traffic. At one intersection, both an automobile and a bicycle attempted to sneak through a red light at the end of a yellow. The bike was going straight and the car was turning left, and they collided. The car was barely moving and fortunately, the woman on the bike was not hurt….but she was mad! She jumped up off the ground and picked her bike up, ripped her helmet off, and with bike in tow, ran after

My son is getting married and the Wisconsin bridal shower for my future daughter-in-law is going on right now. Since the rain was coming down hard when my wife was to start out on the two hour drive to the “shower” this morning, I volunteered to drive her. So here I am, sitting at a McDonald’s in the town where we raised our kids, a McDonald’s where Junior played many times in the kids crawling gym as a little boy, waiting for my wife to finish. Back when the kids were little

A thief in Orem, Utah, discovered an important principle: Know where you are going before you commit the crime.     When John White flagged down a policeman to ask for directions, the officer noted that the man matched the description of someone accused of stealing two phones from a nearby convenience store, and the address White wanted turned out to be the same one the officer was checking.     The address had been left on a slip of paper the thief left at a gas station, acc

The heat is on! Well, it was anyway.     We were a little warm in church last week. The auditorium was fine, but the lobby? Something was definitely wrong. It was bad enough that we had no air on a 90° day, a day we had planned extra fellowship in the new lobby after our 4:00 PM annual celebration. The lobby was so hot we had to move the food into the auditorium where it was cool. But you wouldn’t believe Monday morning. It was 96° in there when I arrived and the heat was ON!

We are a camping family. I’m sure for all of you who were born and raised in the city, that is your stereotype for those of us from Wisconsin. I will have to admit that I grew up enjoying the outdoors: hunting, fishing, camping, hiking and biking. Most of my happiest childhood memories were in the woods, hiking the bluffs along the Mississippi, on the Mississippi fishing, or sleeping in a tent in a campground. But believe it or not, most people in Wisconsin are no more famili

That moment changed everything for me. I saw the world through a different lens. The words, “love” and “respon-sibility” took on completely different meanings. It was one thing to go from “single” to “husband.” That was actually pretty easy (for me––not for Linda!). But going from “man” to “father” changed me forever.     Junior wasn’t always “Junior.” He actually has a different middle name than me and we originally planned on calling him “Daniel,” for his middle name. But e

It started with a lack of oversight. We don’t know the whole story yet, but it won’t be long before we learn that maintenance had slipped and accountability was lacking. Someone didn’t do something they should have done. When disaster struck, those responsible minimized the damage. Oversight agencies were assured that the owners would take care of it themselves. All the while, black oozed from the damaged area deep beneath the surface at the rate of 210,000 gallons a day (ini

Unbelievable. I was dumbstruck. You’ve heard all about it as well and probably became as disgusted as I was when I read the story. A Tennessee woman was so eager to be a mom that she spent a lot of money and went through years of preparation to adopt a child from Russia. But when he turned out to be more of a challenge then she bargained for, she thought she could just return him, like you would a coffee pot at Wal-Mart because it lacked the features you expected to be standa

A number of years ago, in a mental institution just outside Boston, Mass., a young girl known as “Little Annie” was locked in the dungeon. This institution was one of the more enlightened ones for the treatment of the mentally disturbed. However, the doctors felt that a dungeon was the only place for those who were “hopelessly” insane. In Little Annie’s case, they saw no hope for her, so she was confined to a living death in that small cage which received little light and eve