Saying “I had a medical scare” seems melodramatic. It was medical but I was never really “scared.” Concerned? Yeah. Spooked? Sure. It’s just that calling it a “medical scare” seems unfair to people that actually have medical scares. Semantics aside, I woke up Friday morning with numbness and tingling in my left hand and foot, which over the course of a visit to our local urgent care facility spread to my leg, arm, and—for a delightful short period—the left side of my face. 

The doctors at urgent care felt like this all warranted a visit to the emergency room and so I spent most of the day at one of the fine hospitals in our city undergoing a battery of tests. To cut to the chase, I didn’t have a stroke. Whatever was going on with the left side of my body was likely some sort of combination of a bulging disc between two vertebrae and possibly stress. So there are lessons to be learned.

To reach these conclusions, I had to get a couple of MRIs done. I had never been in an MRI machine before and I now have no desire whatsoever to get in one again. If you had asked me prior to Friday whether I was claustrophobic, I would have laughed and said, “Oh, of course not.” But after that session in a high tech coffin, I totally understand why people are afraid of enclosed spaces. I guess the thing I said at the beginning about never really being scared isn’t exactly true.

This is video of the sermon that I preached this past Sunday at The Bridge worship service in which I tell the story of cafeteria crime spree in my middle school, look at the passage where Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Temple, wrestle with another mass shooting, and talk about our calling as Christians to flip over tables in the world.

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.