It’s easy during this season of holidays to get so caught up in the preparations – the shopping, cooking, cleaning, errand-running and all the rest – to miss the actual event itself. But if we choose, we can find a moment or two where the we not only observe the holiday but allow it to draw us beyond the ordinary. Which is only appropriate, as the word holiday itself is a combination of words, “holy day,” a day set aside to contemplate and give thanks for the blessings of this life. What I like about W.S. Merwin’s poem “For the Anniversary of My Death” is that it offers us a snapshot or frozen moment of such introspection. It...

I started this blog six months ago as something of an experiment to see if I (and by extension others) can discover how to write on matters of faith and daily life in a way that would be helpful and even (on a good day!) interesting to everyday Christians. Five years earlier I had led the team that developed WorkingPreacher.org, a site devoted to preaching resources. Since it’s launch it’s been a huge success, garnering well over a quarter million hits a month. But as I always tell folks, Working Preacher is the “low hanging fruit.” Preachers have to preach sermons each and so they know they can use good resources that are readily...