Weekly Reflections

A brief pause each week to consider what matters, what lingers, and what’s worth remembering.

These stories are available on audio through Substack.

Asking Why is Terrifying Yet It’s the Only Road to Truth

This journey to realize and claim our birthright as children of God only begins when we ask why. When we question the world. When our heart whispers to our head because intuitively it knows that something is very, very wrong within God’s good world.

07
Feb

Choosing a Faith Rooted in Love Not Ideology

We all have a faith, even those who profess no faith. Faith isn’t just about believing in the unseen; it’s about believing in what you have seen. It’s about your motivation to get out of bed each morning. It’s about persevering through struggles and setbacks. It’s about holding onto [...]

31
Jan

The Selling of Fear: The Salvation of Love

We live in a world that only seeks to sell us stuff. Everything from status to salvation is commoditized to try and separate us from our finite time, labored wages and our singular standing as children of God. Divinely created not to be mere objects that consume, but subjects [...]

24
Jan

The Myth of Divided Loyalties, the Lies We Tell Ourselves and the Suck of Politics

In 1963, three years before I was born and two years after the US sent its first combat troops into Vietnam, CS Lewis would write, “The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.” More [...]

10
Jan

My Blue Christmas

I used to love Christmas and the things that surrounded it. The luminous lights, the December decorations, and of course the tasty treats. Remembering a time before the Internet when you couldn’t buy peppermint bark in July and when Santa’s wasn’t competing with scary witches. Our years in America [...]

20
Dec

Right of Center Field: Rediscovering Sunday Fellowship

One Sunday afternoon in late winter, I went out drinking with my friend Ted. We had meet several months before, both recent transplants to Minnesota, both of us outsiders. He was from Wisconsin, I was from Illinois, and he became my closest friend while living in Minnesota. We were [...]

13
Dec

When the French Killed My False Faith in Meritocracy

A year after my fiftieth birthday, the leadership structure where I worked underwent some significant changes. When change happens at the very top, the rest only rolls one way, demonstrating the laws of gravity. I was right in the middle of that way. After spending my entire adult life [...]

06
Dec

From God to Drugs: How Someone With a Masters in Theology Ended Up in Pharma Marketing

No longer my source of income, student loans were now my source of debt. I needed to quickly find a job. I signed up with an employment agency despite limited secretarial skills, having opted out of typing class in high school. (I’m still paying for that shortsighted decision. Like [...]

22
Nov

Paradise Lost: Pets, Loss and the Power of Love

In the fall of 2019, we noticed Mozzer’s health was declining. Prior to this, he had been a very healthy cat. Vet appointments consisted of routine vaccines, routine dental care, and no prescriptions. We knew he had been born with a heart murmur and that as a breed the [...]

15
Nov

Appalachian Summer: An Unexpected Lesson in Gratitude

When I was sixteen going on seventeen, our church youth group learned about the Appalachia Service Project (ASP), a Christian nonprofit ministry focused on the “eradication of substandard housing in Central Appalachia.” Growing up, I was aware that there were families who didn’t have the same standard of living [...]

08
Nov

Imago Dei: My Lutheran Love Letter

I spent almost every summer while in college as a camp counselor at Imago Dei, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) camp in Wisconsin. Youth ministry had become my passion and purpose, one so personally fulfilling that I justified the fact that I was attempting to love God [...]

01
Nov

Owasippe: A Love Letter to Scouting

I loved Scouting as a teenager, and it absolutely made me a better human. I still draw on the skills and knowledge I developed in Scouts, and I look back with fondness on the many friends I made and the experiences I had with them during this time when [...]

25
Oct