Having just come back from the beach (and with one more week coming up the week after Labor Day week), and with Labor Day coming up, I’ve been thinking about vacations and vocations. I might focus on vocations this Sunday. But for this blog, I’d like you to think about your vacations. What if we were to think of them as an extended Sabbath? This assumes, of course, that we are taking a Sabbath - a day to completely set aside work to pursue rest, recreation, and relationships.

Dave and I visited Sante Fe during our recent vacation. The one goal I had for the visit was to see the "Miraculous Spiral Staircase" at the Sisters of Loretto chapel. The story is that in the late 1870's the architect who designed the convent, church, and chapel died before designing a link between the chapel floor and the choir loft 22 feet above the floor. The chapel is narrow, so a traditional staircase would have taken up considerable space. The nuns prayed, specifically

This is my dog, Lucy. I am trying to be more and more like her. Certainly not in all respects; we are, after all, different species. But in many respects, I think she has much to teach me. First, there’s what to do when a loved one walks in the door. What do most of us do? We might be absorbed in something and not even notice. Or be in the midst of something and be too busy to look up. Or say, “Is that you?” My dog does none of these things. When I come home, she hears the ga

“What you said is, ‘God’s got our back,’” I told the preacher when I walked out the door after a service at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver a few years back. It was a good sermon: and I was reminded of it again last Sunday when Mollie, the new intern at Mount Olive, where I’ve been worshipping in Minneapolis, made the same point with an entirely different set of images – from rock climbing and learning to trust the person who was managing her ropes! It also hit home in a diffe

These blogs are almost uniformly op/ed type pieces. This one will be different. I have two items of information I want to share to highlight we are clearly part of a community. First, we are now worshiping in the Bootless Stageworks space. That's because it's air conditioned, and the AC in our chapel is not working. The Bootless space is also bigger than the chapel. And they've got a nice sound system. For your convenience, please enter through the pantry (street level) door.