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So in my last blog, I revealed my first tattoo.

A paradox: something that is the opposite of what you’d expect to be true, even though it’s quite true, and maybe all the more true because of the contradiction held in the tension of competing truths.

Anna- curious of your understanding of Matthew 13:36-43.  Is this really telling of a one time judgement and not an eternal one?  I was thinking of our conversation at Outlaw Ranch this past week.  It sounds pretty eternal to me.

I try to believe that grace is a fundamental teaching of the Lutheran faith. I have trouble with that at times. Any ideas?

Question: If we are saved by God’s grace and yet we continue to turn our back on God, i.e., we don’t practice our faith, we don’t pray, we don’t read God’s word, we continue to repeat the same sins over and over, etc. if we die are we saved or did we fall short of God’s grace? Ref: Hebrews 10:26-31
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Dear OMG’ers,

In a conversation about process theology with a Spent Dandelioner a spell back, it clicked that process holds to a God always active.

Below is a reduxed, modified FB post I made a couple of weeks ago.  Given that tomorrow is Reformation Day, I’d like to share it more widely via this blog, but you are also welcome to visit that post (hyperlinked here) to see the conversation—and there was one!—generated there.

I woke up to a rare bad dream the other night.

“For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.” Romans 3:28
“Be still, then, and know that I am God,” Psalm 46:10.
Sunday, October 29 is Reformation Sunday, a High Feast Day of sorts in the Lutheran Tradition.

Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

Standing in my jammies in the living room, cupping my coffee in front of the new fire, warming my chilly bones early on a sub-zero Minnesota New Year’s Day morning, I mulled, yet again, why I haven’t written or posted much on social media for such a long time.

Although we Lutherans like to think he did, Luther never used the phrase “priesthood of all believers.”

The thing about redemption is that sometimes, we don’t actually want it.

Limits.

So here we are not just in the fourth week of Advent, but are officially staring Christmas straight on.

In the last couple of weeks, my daughter Else discovered an etymology that somehow, I’d never thought to think about.

Dear all,

This past Saturday, I was very honored to be the speaker at this year’s Excellence in Preaching event sponsored by St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota.