Dear Partner in Preaching, Have you ever noticed that it’s often in the most challenging times of life that we sense God’s presence most clearly? I’m not saying it should be this way. Or that God only appears when we most need God. Rather, I think that there’s just something about significant challenges and trials that clarify our priorities and cut through the manifold distractions of everyday life so that we may see God more clearly. I think that’s part of what’s going on in today’s Gospel reading. After feeding the thousands who followed him into the wilderness, Jesus commands the disciples to head across the sea without...

There is something both beautiful and sad about Barbara Crooker’s poem “Surfer Girl.” And it’s something beautiful and sad that I’ve experienced this past week at our cottage on Lake Otsego. Getting old, someone said, is not for sissies. And my siblings and I can testify to the truth of that statement as we live into the reality of being middle-aged. Water skiing – my substitute for Crooker’s surfing – didn’t hurt this much when I was half the age I am now. Nor did running…or sleeping on the less than perfect mattresses that furnish the cottage. And, quite frankly there are a lot of things like that. And so as I...

I took this picture just a few moments ago. It’s the view from the porch of a summer cottage that’s been in our family for more than a hundred years. Our cabin, named Ogontz by my forebears generations ago, looks over Lake Otsego, a nine-mile long lake in mid-state NY that ends (or starts, depending on your point of view) at Cooperstown, NY. Long before Cooperstown was known for the Baseball Hall of Fame (which I’ve gone to a dozen times, though almost always when taking visiting guests to the museum), it was home to the stories of James Fenimore Cooper, one of the earliest America novelists. The town was named for...