I saw my youngest son be brave today. It is the first day of school. His older brother has been looking forward to getting back to the routine, especially after discovering one of his best friends would be in his class. Liam has not been as eager to make the return. Holding his hand as we walked into the building, I worried about him. We dropped Jim off in his classroom and then weaved past new backpack-toting students and their doting parents.

We arrived in his first grade class. His teacher taught EA when she went to school here; which thrills us and helps him a little. Slowly we work our way over to a desk with his name on it. A girl from his class last year smiles and waves at him. He puts his backpack in the cubby and then sat down. EA and I stooped down to tell him goodbye. He hugged us both, used his arms to wipe tears out of his eyes, and told us goodbye.

He didn’t beg us to stay. He didn’t run after us like he did last year. He was nervous. He was sad. But without any prompting from his mom or I, he decided he was going to stay and try. I can only imagine how difficult that was for him. I know it was colossally tough. He has told us for weeks that he didn’t want to go back. He went back today and he stayed. That 6 year old is my hero.

This is video of the sermon that I preached this past Sunday at The Bridge worship service in which I wrestle with Romans 6, particularly the famous 23rd verse which states “The wages of sin are death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” I also get interrupted by Siri on my watch and whiff big time on a fish-related joke.

This is video of the sermon that I preached this past Sunday at The Bridge worship service in which I took a big picture view of Paul’s letter to the Philippians and what we can learn from the joy that helped him rise above his imprisoned circumstances. I also talk about being locked up in a jail-themed escape room with middle schoolers and how praying over students at summer camp felt like a personal prison break. Hope you enjoy.

You were so excited to turn 9 today. I don’t know if I have ever met anyone who was as pumped to hit that age as you have been. 10? Sure. It’s double digits. And you will be ecstatic to turn 10 I am sure. But today you turned 9 and today that was the greatest thing of all.

Every year, I feel like I am going to do an increasingly inadequate job of writing these letters to you. The older you get the more enmeshed you are into our lives. It becomes increasingly difficult to remember a time when your presence didn’t fill our home, when your squinty, freckled smile didn’t greet us in the morning, when you didn’t crawl up into one of our laps.

And I know I have mentioned this before, but it also doesn’t feel like it should have been this long. Nine? How do we have a nine year old kid? You’re a year away from ending your elementary school career. And, yes, part of that is because Nashville public schools do middle school from 5th to 8th grade—which seems absurd to me—but the reality is still staring your mom and I in the face. You should not be this old, but it also feels like you’ve always been with us. Parenting is weird, buddy.

I go through these seasons when I listen to an album over and over again. Eventually those songs become intertwined with specific eras in my life. Since high school, there have been about a dozen or so of these kind of albums. In the Fall of 2013, that album was Vampire Weekend’s excellent (and ridiculously named) third album Modern Vampires of the City.

It was a season in my life when I was agonizing over whether to continue on a path that I loved but was becoming increasingly unsustainable. The unease, discontent, and against-odds glimpses of hope in songs like “Unbelievers,” “Hannah Hunt,” “Ya Hey,” and others evoke that time in which I ultimately decided to stalk out into an unknown wilderness that eventually led me here.

Now nearly 6 years later, Vampire Weekend has released their followup Father of the Bride (I think they are intentionally trolling people with album titles). I don’t know if this collection of songs will join my pantheon of signpost albums. I was initially underwhelmed by it, but I have warmed up to it a bit more. A major reason why I’ve listened to this release enough for it to grow on me is because I’ve been obsessed with the second track of the album ever since I laid ears on it. Musically, “Harmony Hall” is gorgeous. It lights up all sorts of melodic receptors in my brain. When you marry that music to lyrics that simultaneously capture and haunt me it turns into one of those songs that I restart the second it begins to fade out.

There was a moment deep into Avengers: Endgame that knocked the wind out of me and I knew it was coming. If you haven’t been keeping up with the blockbuster behemoth, the previous movie devastatingly ends with the intergalactic villain Thanos wiping out the population of half the universe. So the whole premise of Endgame quickly becomes a desperate attempt to somehow, someway get those individuals back.

…

I think we all just really want to see resurrection.

In this world where there often seems to be so much darkness, we just desperately want to see that Hail Mary of Hope succeed. We want to know that the end is not the end. That belief that somehow, someway God is going to make all things right, that goodness triumphs, and resurrection is real is something that I still—in spite of all the obstacles—cling to.

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.