Sermon Blog

  Have you ever had one of those times?   For me it was the awards assemblies in high school.   We would gather and they would start presenting the awards.   They would get to a particular subject area where I thought I had truly excelled.   I had aced the tests, I had gotten amazing grades on projects.   I had done extra credit.   I had behaved (at least as far as the teacher could tell) in class.   I had striven to be the teacher’s pet.   I would be at the top of the teacher’s list.   They would start calling out names of those that the teacher felt worthy of recognition, and I would wait to hear my name called.   It wasn’t first, well it would come soon.   I just knew it would be the next name called.   Then there it was, the end of the names, and I…had not been named. Maybe it’s happened to one of us in the workplace.   We’ve worked hard.   We’ve done everything our supervisors asked.   We’ve g...

  A retiree was given a set of golf clubs by his co-workers. Thinking he'd try the game, he asked the local pro for lessons, explaining that he knew nothing whatever of the game. The pro showed him the stance and swing, then said, "Just hit the ball toward the flag on the first green." The novice teed up and smacked the ball straight down the fairway and onto the green, where it stopped inches from the hole. "Now what?" the fellow asked the speechless pro. "Uh... you're supposed to hit the ball into the cup." the pro finally said, after he was able to speak again. "Oh great! NOW you tell me," said the beginner. Two weeks ago, as we began our series on prayer and reflected on praying without ceasing, I opened up with a story of a young girl who could talk non-stop and said that we all know folks, again, maybe they’re us, who are the same way. We considered the importance of being in constant awareness of Go...

  I don’t know if children still do this, but when I was a kid my friend and I would often talk about what we would wish for if we discovered a genie’s lamp or some other way of making wishes.   We didn’t always agree on what we would wish for, other than the first wish.   Our first wish, if we were granted three wishes, was always for unlimited wishes.   I remember saying I would wish to be a superhero—for me it was not Superman or Spiderman, it was to have the powers of Green Lantern or the arsenal and skill of Green Arrow.   There were wishes to own a private island—along the lines of Gilligan’s Island—I never understood why he wanted to escape from that tropical paradise.   As I grew older the wishes became a little more realistic, you know wishes for cars like a candy-apple red ’65 Mustang, a DeLorean, or a hearse, or wishes for a particular girlfriend.   I think we have all, at some point in our lives if we are completely honest, had those fa...

  Natalie was a talkative child.   I had many conversations with teachers over the years.   There was a teacher that once told me that Natalie was the only person that they knew that could talk on the inhale and exhale, seemingly to be able to talk without ceasing.   Have you ever had a conversation with someone who will just not stop talking?   Maybe they’ve said something that you want to respond to, only they won’t even seem to stop long enough to take a breath so that you can interrupt and say something.    Maybe they go on and on so long that our mind drifts to other things…like what’s for lunch, what’s for dinner, what’re we going to watch tonight, what’s that crawling up the wall…we’ve completely zoned out, and when they finally stop, they look at us with a puzzled expression, leaving us to realize that there was a question asked somewhere along the line of our time thinking about everything but what they were saying, and now they’re finally...