Dear Friends, It’s been a while since I’ve posted, I know. It’s been hard to be away from you all, but my current call at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church (Mpls) — which has been the absolute delight and privilege of my career — has made it hard to find the time to keep up the weekly discipline of writing on the upcoming RCL selections (particularly as we’ve moved to a narrative lectionary pattern — more on that, perhaps, in a later post). But… given what we’re all facing together, and because I am not spending quite as much time commuting(!), I thought I would try to resume that...

Three-in-One Plus One   Dear Partner in Preaching, Imagine with me for a moment, the delight you would experience in discovering that you had a long lost uncle or aunt who had made you the heir to their estate. Can you see it? You’d wake up one morning and discover that they had left you riches beyond count, that your major financial worries were over, and that you really didn’t have to worry all that much about the future. If that scenario happened, how would you feel? What would you do? Or, more to the point, what would you do differently? And here I don’t mean what would you run out and buy – though I suspect that most of us...

Do you have seven minutes to change your life? Really. This is one of the more powerful and important videos I’ve seen in a long time. It’s about happiness. In particular, it’s about the connection between gratitude and happiness. As it turns out, expressing gratitude is one of the most effective ways to increase happiness. Which is what makes this video powerful – not the idea itself, which we’ve explored in other places on this blog – but because the good folks at Soul Pancake actually took research about the connection between expressing gratitude and levels of happiness and replicated the experiment and filmed it for us to...