Abel spent the afternoon prepping the vegetable plate: slicing shiitakes and scallions, reducing the risotto, and spreading the mixture on sheet pans to let it cool. Then he enlisted me to make the rice balls and roll them in Japanese breadcrumbs. He cut sweet potatoes, blanched greens, and roasted garlic
The whole scene arrived in the middle of a week when the story of the Prodigal Son is the lectionary passage, about as gift wrapped as a sermon illustration could be. Nomar Garciaparra, longtime and well-loved shortstop for the Boston Red Sox who was traded away, came home day before
I can’t say I have ever heard God speak out loud, but I think I’ve come close. Whatever God’s voice actually sounds like, I think I come close to hearing it when our children lead worship. Last Sunday, they led our call to worship by lining up
In order to survey, Kit said, you always have to have two points. In a photo, he leans over his tripod looking through the scope, high above Otowi Bridge in northern New Mexico, sighting a distant point on the other side of the river . . . I thought of him as making
I pastored a small rural church while I was in seminary. On more than one occasion, I asked directions to go visit someone in the community I didn’t know and I would be told, “Well, they live in the old Turner place.” Come to find out, the Turners had
we pass the silver plate of broken bread with less confidence than we pass the peace easier perhaps to hug than to admit our hunger we take and eat without a word and wait for the wine’s weaker friend shot glasses of salvation we place the empties in the
We’ve been spending Saturday mornings during Lent with Job at our church: coffee, fruit, pastries, and suffering – what a way to spend a weekend. I’m the discussion leader and the guy who starts the coffee pot, so I get there early to get both the pot and my
I had a little time to read this afternoon and began Peter Gomes’ book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus . The opening quote read: The great principle dominating the composition of Scripture is that of the ascent towards discovery. -- Henri Daniel-Rops A half hour earlier, I was listening to NPR’
A friend of mine is taking a song writing class. I talked to her today, interrupting her homework, and she told me her assignment was to write a song full of clichés. The dictionary says a cliché is “a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or
Yesterday, March 2, was my parents’ fifty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was also Texas Independence Day, and the birthday of both of my friends, Todd Lake and Lance Laird. All of those hold significance in my life, but I have to say today, March 3, matters more. It is not a
Today I worked on a project that was off the menu, if you will, along with the other prep I had to do to get ready for dinner. One of the organizations in Durham that works hard to figure out how to feed and house folks who, for whatever reason,
The restaurant where I work at Duke serves dinner Monday through Thursday, which means we do our best to run out of everything on Thursday night and we have to recreate most everything on Monday. I go in on Monday mornings (I get there about eleven) and start working my