Musings of a Youth Worker

Take a moment and pause, try to put yourself in the mindset of an American in 1863. It is the middle a grueling civil war, a civil war fought between brother and neighbor. A split of adversity that seems almost impossible to overcome. Abraham Lincoln recognizes the war as a failure of our human nature, and He addressed the United States with the following proclamation: Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart… as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion. At a time when it seemed impossible to love your enemy, President Lincoln calls on the entire nat

For God So Loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son. John 3:16. This passage was read this past week, as the Sunday before the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14th). If there is any passage we have memorized, it is this one; and we can give thanks to that by how enamored our Evangelical brothers and sisters are with this passage. They post it on billboards, bumper stickers, and you can even find it tattooed on some peoples bodies. However, with how liberally the Evangelical community likes to throw around the numbers 3:16, it shows me that many of them do not understand the gravity of this statement. We were created to be with God, to be like God, but we (mankind) fell away from that likeness. It has since been a constant battle with ourselves and the devil to reclaim our place in heaven with God. We fell so far from grace, that, as St. Athanasius says, "God became man, so that we might become God." Christ came into this w

We have now embarked on our fourth day of Holy Week, the betrayal of Christ is imminent, but do we truly understand the gravity of what transpires the night Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane? The name Judas is familiar to us, colloquially we throw his name around when we are slighted by a friend of ours, usually referring to a minor laps in trust or perhaps an ill advised joke. We make light of the betrayal of Christ into the hands of the Sanhedrin and compare an acquaintance of ours to the one who sentenced Christ to death. In actuality it is unfair for us to use the name of Judas in this manner, there was more than one disciple named Judas, the Gospel of John uses his surname to differentiate between Judas, the one who betrayed Christ, and another named Judas who was part of the 12. (John 14:22, Mark 6:3) What we do know of Judas is limited to the Gospel narrative, much else needs to be filled in by what we know about Christ and the Apostles, as revealed to us throu

It has been a year now since I first stepped foot into Big Shoulders CrossFit. It was not of my own direction but simply because one evening I received a text message from my coach Ryan, asking if I was interested in checking out what the gym had to offer.  I always had goals of reaching a certain level of fitness, but was never able to make a lot of progress by myself. When I finished grad-school in 2015 I weighed in at 6'2" and 149 lbs. In laymen's terms borderline malnourished, and I can assure you there was nothing wrong with my appetite. What was wrong with me is that I was not feeding myself properly, nutritionally or physically, and by consequence spiritually as well. From December 2015 until June 2016 I recognized that I needed to make a change and started on a consistent work-out routine. This was successful for a time, I put on about 8 pounds, I was eating well, I was feeling good, but a problem arose. After a few months it became too easy to justify

In today’s Gospel(11/19/2017), we hear the parable of The Rich Fool. In order to understand the parable that we encounter today, it is important to understand the context in which Christ is telling this  parable. Moments before Christ told this story, there was a man in the crowd, who recognized Jesus’ authority, but misunderstood his message and underestimated his wisdom. The man commands Jesus to order his brother to split his inheritance with him. To which Christ responds saying, “[A man’s]   life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” I t is this conversation that prompts the story that we heard from the Gospel today. To truly understand the selfishness of the wealthy man's actions, we need to first reexamine the beginnings of Genesis, and how God created us. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all th

The other day I was driving with my mother on the way home from lunch. The sun was shining through the window on the warm August afternoon, it was nice to take a few moments and simply breath the warm air, and enjoy the drive between my house and Chipotle. It is by no means a scenic drive, but it is familiar. Much of the past few weeks had been spent in the office, sitting behind my desk preparing my youth programs for the coming semester at church. My mind was buzzing with lesson plans, event schedules, church calendars, bible parables, and ice breaker games. While I was driving I fell into a sort of afternoon daze, I start counting, out loud, with no actual goal number in mind, to the melody of Row row row your Boat. "One, Two, Three four five, Six, Seven eight nine ten"  Maybe it was the pound of chicken and beans in my stomach, or the hypnotizing August sunshine, but for some reason I found this uncontrollably hilarious. My mother gave me a perplexed look, much like the