I lied to a handful of ministers and then I walked out of the room.

I went to a youth minister’s conference with a couple of other individuals from our student ministry staff. The event was run by a conservative evangelical organization, which doesn’t exactly line up with our more mainline Protestant church. But I tried to go in with an open mind because you can and should be able to learn from people whose viewpoints are different from your own.

On the second day, I attended a breakout session about Generation Z (the placeholder name for the generation of which my students are part). I took studious notes. There were some good points in there; didn’t agree with everything. Yet when do you agree with everything? Then the leader announced that we were going to break up in small groups and talk about our youth as it pertained to human sexuality.

My stomach plummeted.

I knew that I was going to be the odd man out in this conversation. You’re not supposed to assume. But I assumed. And I assumed correctly. The guy to my right went first and the group proceeded to go counter-clockwise rendering my would-be dissent last. The others in that circle were not mean. They weren’t hostile. Yet what they were was certain.

I began Lent with the best of intentions. I made two manageable commitments: to give up Coke for those 40 days and to spend each morning meditating on scripture via sketching some sort of drawing. Cracks started forming as the season progressed but Holy Week took a sledgehammer to my Lenten practice. By Good Friday, I hadn’t done a morning meditation all week and I was walking into Youth Group with a Coke in my hand.

Serving in a church is one of my absolute favorite things. I love that I get to work with Youth, preach on occasion, and do things like Maundy Thursday worship services. But the preparation for and execution of a three-day stretch of a Maundy Thursday service, Good Friday Stations of the Cross, Good Friday Youth Group, and Good Friday Youth Lock-In on an already exhausted body and spirit hobbled me to the point where I was limping out of Lent. It was all great, but I was shot. On Easter Sunday, I wanted with all my heart to radiate energy for Christ had risen. Christ had risen indeed. I gave it what I had, but stumbled over my words to the point that I had to stop and reset while giving the Words of Institution for Communion.

This is video of the sermon that I preached a couple of Sundays ago at The Bridge worship service on Luke 7:36-8:3 about our assumptions, the stories the church has often told about women, and the great grace of God. Like I said when I posted the manuscript, the ending was a little bit different. Hope you enjoy.

Post-bedtime was probably not the right moment to write this. You do not like bedtime and of late it has not been your finest hour of the day behavior-wise. Yet your mom and I learning. Parenting, you may find this out one day, is a process. You are always recalibrating, always figuring out what works, what makes things better. It requires lots of patience, some luck, and a love stronger than whatever your kid throws at you.

My love for you is stronger than whatever you throw at us. So even though bedtime didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like, I can still come downstairs and write this. We love you more than you will ever know. I say to both you and your brother a lot. I say it because it is true. Truer than true. It is honestly one of the things I am most confident about in the world.

It is time for my annual tradition of filling out the NCAA Tournament bracket based on the very important question “Which mascot would win in a fight?” As always, the answers of these questions are thoroughly researched (i.e. Google, Wikipedia, and a host of college athletic websites), based on the concept of a one-on-one fight, and follow an ironclad set of internal rules that I have kept as I been doing this for many, many years. I’ll go through the regions to explain some of my reasoning.

First Four
I had to think about two of these for a moment. A bruin is easily going to beat an owl and a knight is definitely going to defeat a panther (weapons and armor are a key factor). Eagle versus Bison (NC Central vs. ND State)? I went back and forth but ultimately went with the eagle for its ability of flight. If the bison could rear up on its hind legs and swat at the eagle like a bear, then I’d give it a shot. And then there is Sun Devils versus Red Storm (Arizona State vs. St. John’s). These are two nebulous, hard-to-define mascots. Ultimately, the Sun Devil mascot looks goofy and if in some hypothetical scenario it receives power from the sun then a storm should take it out (also, Arizona State clearly had a weaker basketball resume than my alma mater Furman and shouldn’t be in the tournament at all).

I love Ash Wednesday, which is admittedly an odd thing to love. The message of the day is that we are dust. We are frail. We are fallen. “Dust you are and to dust you will return.” One might as well play the Sufjan Stevens song that ends with refrain “We’re all gonna die / We’re all gonna die / We’re all gonna die.” I heard that song once playing in a bookstore. I looked around to see if anyone noticed our mortality was calling to us over the P.A. system. It was one strangely dark moment.

Ash Wednesday is not that bleak. There is the promise of Easter and resurrection on the other side of the Lenten wilderness. And perhaps that, besides my nerdery about the church, is why I love Ash Wednesday so much. It is this collision between reality and hope, fallenness and grace, death and life, the end and the beginning. It is this beautiful, complicated paradox that for some reason seems truer than true to me.

So as a minister I am not always sure what to say when I take the ash and make a cross on someone’s forehead. This is only the third year in which I have had this honor and I have said something different each year. I do not want to merely say that someone is dust and to dust they will return. It is an essential reminder, but it is not the entire story on this day. And I do not want to merely remind someone that God loves them. For to ignore the reality that we are dust removes all the bass notes that grounds that amazing reminder.

The Zelda video games can be kind of hit and miss for me. I appreciate the franchise for the trailblazer that it is, but only a few of its entries—Ocarina of Time and Link’s Awakening—have truly grabbed me. But my brother has raved about Breath of the Wild for about a year and a half. I trust my siblings’ recommendations implicitly for they rarely if ever steer me the wrong way. The game has sucked me in; it is an astonishingly great play.

I am kind of in a holding pattern right now. I have recaptured three of four Divine Beasts—MacGuffin-esque weapons that will help me defeat the series antagonist Ganon—and my sons want to see me take down the fourth. We try to limit the time that they’re in front of a screen so when I play during the week it is usually after they go to bed. So I am just whiling away time exploring the vast and varied world, looking for shrines, and secrets, and side quests. During this meandering journey is where I found a story of Quixotic yet beautiful hope.

The Kingdom of Hyrule is on the precipice of calamity. It’s been a hundred years since Ganon’s evil has laid waste to those who dared challenge him. Civilizations were razed. Their technology was possessed and turned into murder machines. Literal monsters lurk around seemingly every corner. One person—the titular Zelda—has single-handedly been keeping this evil from consuming Hyrule for a century and time is running out. So I bought a house.

This is one that I’ve been trying to digest for a few weeks. While driving one day, I was listening to a podcast featuring Rob Bell: pastor, author, and John Piper’s heretic. He was discussing this guy who once came to him wanting to be a speaker. So Rob let him follow him everywhere. Like everywhere; even to the therapist. Eventually this guy got some invitations to speak/preach/whatever. He had some thought-provoking points, great story, what he thought were good jokes. But it didn’t land the way he wanted. When they didn’t respond the way he was hoping, he collapsed. 

At this point, I am completely identifying with the guy. I have been there. You work on something. You put your heart and soul into it and you are just truly excited about it. Then you offer it up and it doesn’t quite stick. It’s sort of like a small death. It causes you to question all sorts of things about yourself, your calling, etc.

In talking to this guy afterwards, Rob said, “Oh, your joy was in their hands. You walked out and handed this roomful of people all the power. And you handed them your joy and you waited for them to give it back…and then you read their response as you weren’t funny, profound, interesting.”

Seven or eight years ago, EA started giving me these journals as encouragement to write and just get my thoughts out. A few years later she quilted a slip case to hold the present active journal. Green and with a pattern of stained glass windows, it is with me nearly every day. In these journals have been lines on which I have written devotional reflections, prayers, and weak stabs at poetry. They are littered with doodles and sketches and brainstorms for everything from games to worship services. As time has gone on, there have been an increasing number of sermons taped within its pages.

By mere coincidence, I hit the end of a journal at the close of last year, which means that I am starting this year with a book full of blank pages. Poetically speaking, it’s a bit on the nose. I have a natural inclination to resist the idea that fresh starts can only happen when the calendar flips to January. Time keeps things ordered, but I am increasingly finding that it doesn’t really play into how we mature. We grow up non-linearally; in fits and starts, in quantum leaps and circling back around. I look at my grandfather ahead of me and desire for his hard-earned wisdom. I look at my sons behind me and yearn for their childlike wonder and hope.