So the Easter season is come and gone, and with it my attempt to practice gratitude by posting one thing for which I’m grateful each day. Now a few days into the season of Pentecost, I thought I’d share a couple of observations about that exercise. 1) Being intentional matters. I think that, by and large, I’m a fairly grateful person. That is, on the whole, I tend to focus far more on the blessings of my life than the setbacks. Nevertheless, “practicing” gratitude – that is, making an intentional effort to name it daily – made a difference. It broadened by “gratitude horizen” and invited to notice even more of the blessings...

I thought this short video was a perfect counter point to, or maybe extension, of yesterday’s post – and comments! – about beauty. Chris Heuertz has spent his life working with the poorest of the poor and, most recently, working with children, women, and men who have been caught up in and abused by human trafficking. You can read more about him and his work at Word Made Flesh and on his blog – great title, btw – If I Blogged…. But he’s not just about advocacy or even help. He’s mostly about community, about living with and helping people fashion resilient communities that have weathered the difficult moments that any real...

I love words. I love what you can do with words. I love playing with words, shaping ideas with them, communicating things that matter to me through them, and affecting the thoughts and feelings of others with them. For all these reasons and more, I love words. But not always. As I’ve said before, I don’t always love words when they come as poems. When words come in poems, they don’t seem to follow the rules, or at least they operate by different rules, rules I haven’t mastered and don’t feel competent at. That’s, in part, why the Saturday poetry post has been important to me. It’s a way to stretch, to push myself to work a...

We’re spending this week at Outlaw Ranch Lutheran Camp, located in the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota. I’ve been fortunate that over the years I’ve been invited to teach at a number of our summer church camps and always look forward to spending time with family and with friends old and new learning about and worshiping God in the beauty of God’s creation. In fact, let me say that a little more forcefully. I don’t just look forward to this time, I long for it, as I’ve come to have a tremendous appreciation for what our summer camps do for our youth and families and, indeed, for the whole church. The Lutheran Church of which...