Advent 2025 Reflections

My Barn The old pole barn on the back acre of my childhood home was the site of a million make-believes. Nothing lived in it but a couple pet rabbits, our stray dog before we invited him inside the house, and whatever rodents temporarily escaped our hunting cats. But every fantasy plot line of my…

Labor of Love It is hard for us to think of Christmas without singing through the songs of Andrew Peterson’s Christmas Concert – Behold The Lamb of God. Much like the Jesus Storybook Bible, it takes us through the Old Testament, but for him, it starts with the Exodus story. But he…

Let it Be Way back in the book of Genesis, chapter 18, after Abraham and Sarah have tried to make God’s promise of children come about by their own machinations. (note: This isn’t a euphemism for sex; Sarah tries to obtain a child by having her husband impregnate her slave woman.) After the mess…

Happy Birthday, Jesus! Today’s passages get us ready to celebrate Jesus’ birth. Of course, with our Advent devotional we’ve been getting ready for 3 weeks… not to mention all the other things we’ve done to get ready for Christmas: planning, listing, shopping, crafting,…

The Reluctant Messenger My brother is name Jonah. But it wasn’t until I was in Seminary and married, when I had the opportunity to make an email address for my brother, that Amy helped me come up with the perfect nickname for him. Whalebarf. Where was Amy when I needed to pick on him when we…

Daniel in the Lion’s Den Just for fun, in the homestretch of our Advent devotional, a little cartoon roundup: And, to connect this favorite children’s Bible story to the God who rescues:

Mushrooms (again) As I said in a sermon back in November, I’m standing by my wishful (and wholly unsupported) translation of Isaiah 11:1 as “a shroom shall come out from the stump of Jesse” rather than the traditional (and accurate, scholarly, etc) translation: “a shoot shall come out from the…

O Come, O Come In her version of the Naaman story, Jesus Storybook Bible author, Sally Lloyd-Jones, writes: “God knew that Naaman was even sicker on the inside than he was on the outside. Naaman was proud. He thought he didn’t need God. … God was not only going to heal Naaman’s skin, he was going…

Psalm 23 Tonight’s Advent activity was wonderfully imperfect… very ordinary. We read The Good Shepherd from the Jesus Storybook Bible, talked about Psalm 23, and then dove into making sheep cupcakes! We ran out of white marshmallows (and found colored ones!), had way too much icing, and ended…

The God of the Underdog We have all heard the story of David and Goliath many times. It is the original underdog story. A young man against a grown man. A shepherd against and warrior. A harp player against a sword-player. And we root for the underdog don’t we. But maybe the real impact of…