When life hands you a bunch of lemons, make lemonade!” So goes the old adage. In the last several installments of the Pastor’s Page (if you missed them, begin here), I shared the experience of our (my sister and I) foiled attempt to hike Vermont’s Long Trail—that 273-mile journey up…
Like many people this time of year, I got to looking at the calendar and compared how much time is left in the year with how much “vacation time” I have available. More than I’ll use, it seems, but thought I should make a stab at it! I did feel…
After having a relatively minor bout with COVID a few weeks ago, my bride finally felt up to getting out for a bit of a hike. We thought about heading south to Matthiessen State Park near LaSalle, Illinois—a little sister park to her more famous neighbor, Starved Rock. Both have…
Living a little under a mile from the church where I serve as pastor, I often walk to the office in the morning to get some exercise. I’ve discovered that listening to an audiobook along the way makes the walk shorter and less routine. There are, after all, only so…
“Here we are as in olden days…” Are we? In many ways, we are. Christmas rolls around again as it has for centuries. Hasn’t always been so universally celebrated; nevertheless, no one alive in the western hemisphere remembers when it wasn’t celebrated. The other night, we went for a Christmas…
Our second granddaughter, the fourth grandchild, came into the world one week ago today, arriving on Tuesday, March 9, 2021. Apparently, she wasn’t too eager to get here—was supposed to show up a week earlier. But as we all know, babies tend to arrive when they’re ready. As every grandparent…
Somewhere along the way, certainly in the last century, someone decided to add a sub-genre of music to the “Christmas/Holiday” category. It might be called “romance” or “love songs” or something like that. I won’t try to prove it statistically, but my hunch is that most new Christmas (or Holiday)…
It was as if the angels were waging a snowball fight with a great swath of northwest Illinois. We were sitting in a restaurant at dinner when the fight began. On our drive to Rockford to meet up with my brothers, the temperature was warm enough that a light, intermittent…
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together and everything goes off without a hitch—no hiccups, snafus, or unexpected “surprises”? I mean, you work hard to put a plan together, coordinate all the pieces, making sure each one functions properly, and then launch time comes. Like a well-oiled machine,…
For the last few weeks, almost everywhere you go, songs of the holiday season fill the air. Some radio stations have even been playing only Christmas music since before Thanksgiving, probably because of the shorter Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period. Have you paid any attention to what’s playing? If so, you’ve probably not…
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