Lessons from Exile: Prayers

Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare. Hello my friends! I feel like the pandemic season has shifted most folks I know in to one of two extremes with their prayer lives. Some folks, suddenly infused with a surplus of free time and sense of urgency for the world have seen an incredible increase in t…

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Lessons from Exile: Welfare

The Lord of heavenly forces, the God of Israel, proclaims to all the exiles I have carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and settle down; cultivate gardens and eat what they produce. Get married and have children; then help your sons find wives and your daughters find husbands in order that they too may have children. Increase in number there so that you don’t dwindle away. Promote the we…

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Lessons from Exile

Greetings friends! As we continue to learn in this season of quarantine to find new ways to connect with each other, we thought it would be a good idea to dust off the old blog, and try to connect with each other a bit that way. So for my part, I have a series in my mind to run on Tuesdays, and some other voices will chime in on the blog here on Thursdays. Also, don’t forget that we do frequent v…

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The Death of Embarrassment

I have written about it before, but one of my favorite tunes comes from the rock group Coldplay. It’s the end of their incredible album Viva La Vida, and they choose to end their album with these words: No I don't want to battle from beginning to end I don't want a cycle of recycled revenge I don't want to follow Death and all of his friends For a long time, death in our culture has been p…

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The Death of Innocence

Watching your kids grow up right in front of you can be a beautiful, yet heartbreaking endeavor. Watching my boys learning how to crawl, how to walk, how to ride a bike, and how to shoot a hockey puck has been one of the greatest joys of my life. But there are other things that my boys are learning to do, and they excite me a little bit less. The other day I was picking the boys up from…

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