the unlikely orange

“Leftovers again?” It’s a refrain that is sometimes heard in our house, especially after Shannon has prepared several great meals in a row. In those times, we often have a collage of containers in the refrigerator, filled with various elements from the dinners of the last few days: broccoli in the glass container with the red lid, brown rice in the green tupperware, and some pork chops wrapped in foil, just to name a few. Sometimes there is enough of this mishmosh of food to last us for several meals, which is when the complaining usually begins, “Leftovers, again?” I was thinking about this on Sunday as we thought about God’s abundance. We remembered story after story in the Bible in which we discover a God of abundance and overflowing goodness. One of the stories was the feeding of the 5,000, in which a huge crowd (some estimate it was as many as 15,000, since women and children wouldn’t have made the count) was fed by a meager 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread. Perhaps the m...

"what shall i cry?" may seem like an odd advent question, but it really is an ancient question.  we hear it in the 40th chapter of isaiah, after God invited isaiah to cry out a word of comfort and peace.  can you imagine what that must be like?  to be given a word from the Lord to cry out?  i mean, what would it take to convince you that such a word was really from the Lord?  how would you use your voice and your talents and your life to share that word?  these are the same kinds of questions isaiah must have wrestled with, when he first felt compelled to cry out for God.  we are given a picture of this early in the book of isaiah, in chapter 6, as isaiah shares a vision in which he sees God high and lifted up, in the company of angels who are singing "holy, holy, holy," and God speaks and asks who will represent God - who will speak for God?   and isaiah is understandably overwhelmed.  he cries out, "i am a man of unclean lips, and i li...

after my trip to the holy land, i promised you that i would write one final post to sort of wrap up my whole experience there, and although it has taken awhile, i am finally delivering on that promise.  while our time there was a whirlwind of activity and a bullrush of information, i spent enough time looking through windows into the past, windows into my own assumptions, and windows into the bible that some light certainly made its way through.  beyond simply having a good time and experiencing a different part of the world, i was both blessed and challenged in deeper ways.  one of the great blessings was experiencing what many have called "the fifth gospel," referring to the incredible visual-ness of being there.  it is one thing to read that Jesus was baptized in the jordan river; it is quite another thing to actually reach down and touch its water.  it is something amazing to read that Jesus turned water into wine, it is something altogether different t...

here is a little video i put together to promote an event in april in which shannon and i will be sharing the stories and pictures of our trip to the holy land.  if you are in the area, come on out to clinton united methodist church on april 11th at 7pm and join us! ***warning: the video includes a brief view of me without a shirt on.  watch at your own risk.

some of you more musically minded folks have asked me about what i ended up with as my playlist for israel.  so i thought i would share.  i plan on doing a post of recap about my experience in israel, and this isn't it, but i know some of you were interested, so... please understand that just as jerusalem is a city that is full of interesting juxtapositions of sacred and secular, my playlist is also a grab bag of styles and genres: i had over 350 songs in the playlist, ranging from ancient hebrew music to contemporary pop; from modern middle eastern techno to 80's christian music.  from the boss to bono to bob marley, and from cash to crowder.  this isn't the full list, but here are some of the highlights: winter song – sara bareilles and ingrid michaelson where the road meets the sun – katie herzig and matthew perryman jones three little birds – bob marley secrets – one republic lullaby – one republic not alone – seabird rescue – seabird ‘til we see the sh...

for those of you who are wondering, we are home safe.  we got up at 1:45 am on saturday morning in jerusalem, and were home by 9pm on saturday night in new jersey.  of course we were traveling west, so it was actually more than 24 hours.  needless to say, it was a long day, and we're happy to be safe at home, even if it is covered in snow.  i never got a chance to write about our last day in the holy land, so i thought i'd give you a quick recap.  we had friday morning free, so shannon and i (along with several others) decided to head back within the old jerusalem wall into what is called "the old city" for some shopping.  there are "streets" there that are really just paved sidewalks lined with tiny little shops, full of vendors trying to sell you their goods.  many of the shops were just clothes or shoes or religious trinkets, but we found some cool shops, including one that sold all kinds of interesting spices, at really good prices.  this p...

a amall opening in the old jeruslaem wall just above the zion gate.  my friends, as i write these words, it is 6:30 on friday evening here in the holy land.  we have finished a rainy day of touring here, and i look forward to sharing it with you, but our flight leaves tel aviv in the morning at 7:30.  which means that we will be leaving the hotel sometime around 3am.  and we still have dinner and two meetings to go yet tonight!  so i won't be updating day 6 of our trip until after i am back in the states, and likely not until i've had several hours of sleep in my bed (this all hinges on whether or not new jersey gets dumped on with snow the way the forecast suggests it might).  so, in any case, i hope you've enjoyed my updates, and i will, of course be sharing more in way of pictures and insights as the Spirit leads.  until then, peace to you. 

today was a day of extremes, in a way, or at least a day of earth, wind and…water. strangely enough, it all started with ice. we woke up to a threat of snow in jerusalem, which turned out to be hail. this hail came down in huge chunks of ice and caught fire as soon as it hit the ground. okay, not really. that’s in egypt. but seriously: hail. i didn’t really come to israel for falling ice. we drove east out of jerusalem into the judea desert. this is the very wilderness where john the baptist lived. i, for one, have never been to a desert before, so this was a new experience for me. but this isn’t your run of the mill desert (although i did see a tumbleweed blowing across the road in what must have been the most cliché moment of the day). no, this desert has no sand! it’s just rocks and dirt. you can see from the picture that it is just hill after hill of dirt and rock. this is also the desert where Jesus went after his baptism in the jordan river, and where he was tempted three ti...

let me start off today by saying how glad i am to know that many of you are following along here on my blog and on facebook, sort of sojourning with us through the holy land. i appreciate your company as we look together through windows into the past, windows that reveal to us a clearer, brighter picture of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and which help us understand the scriptures left to us. i’m certain that i’ll be returning to these windows time and time again in my ministry, using what i find here to enhance my ability to tell the story of this Jesus. and i was able to look through some pretty amazing windows today. we started the day off real early because we had a long drive north out of jerusalem through the jezreel valley, towards the mountains of the north. our first stop was nazareth. as we entered the city, we passed these huge rocky cliffs, and we learned that these cliffs were very likely the ones that the people wanted to push Jesus over after he claimed to...

we have finished our third day in the holy land. Shannon and i are both absolutely spent from a very full day, but i wanted to take a moment and let you know what we’ve been up to today on this side of the world (i still can’t get used to the fact that i live most of my tuesday before most of you even really get started with your tuesday…weird). anyway, we started off the today on the mount of olives, and walked the traditional route for the palm sunday procession. the first thing i would tell you about this is that it is a steep downhill walk! Shannon and i joked that it never looks like this in the children’s sunday school material. we stopped part of the way down to remember how Jesus looked over the city of Jerusalem and wept for it. i got a picture there looking west over Jerusalem with my terrible towel, just to represent steeler nation in the holy land. we finished the walk down the mount of olives to the bottom where the garden of gethesem...

Shalom from the holy land. As I sit down to write this, it is late here, Monday night. I’m pretty tired from a FULL day of learning and seeing. Just as I had hoped, I spent the day looking through windows to the past, windows to my faith, and windows to hope. I don’t want to bore you with every detail, but I will give you at least a thumbnail sketch of what we did today. After breakfast we hopped on our bus and left Jerusalem and entered the west bank. I hate to admit that I didn’t have a very good understanding of what was going on between Israel and Palestine, and the very real and day-to-day problems that this tension presents to the people here. The first place we went in the west bank was the shepherds’ fields, the traditional site for the place where the shepherds were watching their flocks when the angels appeared to them to tell them of the birth of Jesus. We got to see the terrain, get a sense of the incredibly difficult work of shepherding, and even go into a cave that would ...

I sit tonight in a hotel room somewhere in Jerusalem on a sunday night. It’s a far cry from the brown stucco huts and clay-colored buildings of the Jerusalem of from my children’s bible imagination. This is a city, of course. And I sit here with my laptop, a window into the world of search engines and answers to every conceivable question. Just beyond the words I type, above them, is a flat screen plasma television, a window into what entertains this part of the world: shows about football (soccer), gaudy looking talk shows, and scantily-clad dance competitions. But I am not here to look through those windows. I have ascended in a plane (two of them, actually), to this city, with the full intention of looking through a window into the past, to search for the One who asked unanswerable questions. And so I go to sleep tonight in a modern city, full of all the sights and sounds of a modern world, with a heart set not on answers, but on what is ancient. Our trip here was rather non-ev...

i am a pilgrim.  that statement is true for me in many ways, of course, but never quite so literally as today.  today i am not just on the journey of life or faith, but i am much more specifically on a journey towards jerusalem.  i will drive to an airport, get on a huge jet and fly to london.  there i get on a different plane and we fly to tel aviv.  then we get on a bus and ride to the ancient city where we will be staying for the week.  it's a far cry from walking or riding a colt, but it's still a pilgrimage, albeit a modern one.  as i have prepared for and grown in excitement about this trip to the holy land, i have been drawn to the psalms of ascent in the hebrew bible.  psalms 120-134 are called the 'psalms of degrees' or the 'psalms of ascent.'  scholars disagree a bit about why these are called psalms of ascent, but there is agreement that they were songs that would have been song on the approach to jerusalem, and more specificall...