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This past Sunday, November 19th, I had the pleasure of preaching at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Grand Marais, MN.

My girl made her Confirmation this last Sunday, which also was Reformation Sunday, which wasn’t any ordinary Reformation Sunday, but was, rather, the 500th Anniverary of the first (unintentional) Reformation Day, a day which actually falls on today, the day before All Saints’ Day.

Both before and after Charlottesville, I’ve been seeing all sorts of calls to respond to palpable hate with love.

The other day, a person whom I do not know commented on a Facebook post I made objecting to Donald Trump’s announcement that “We’re going to start saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

Most recently, it was White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer who claimed that Hitler “didn’t even use chemical weapons…on his own people.”

This past week, I celebrated my birthday.

We don’t have many Dust Bunnies at our home.

So, Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Friday as our next president.

This morning, I announced to my daughter Else that today was finally Epiphany!

My two children, my father, and I, we really lived it up for our New Year’s Eve last night, I tell you what.

I have a new Jøtul F 118 Black Bear Stove.

A year or so back, thanks to my first cousin once removed (that’d be my cousin Peder’s daughter Solvei: I had to go to a website to make sure I had that relationship term right), I learned about the band Postmodern Jukebox.

The late Joseph Sittler, Lutheran theologian and wordsmith, savored life.

“Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.”  Elie Wiesel, Nobel Lecture, Hope, Despair and Memory

The below entry was published last Sunday in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.  My hyper linking is not doing what it should do, so the link for it is simply splayed out here:  http://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2016/05/14/madsen-when-you-take-only-what-delights-can-freeing/84341626/

Because of my son’s brain injury, I sleep in the same bed with him.

I know Christmas is around the corner (even my family is starting to bust out the Christmas decorations), but Advent does yet have dibs on our attention for a short spell.

If you know nothing else about Martin Luther, you know that he didn’t like indulgences.

Hermey: Hey, what do you say we both be independent together, huh? 

The other day, two parallel events happened in my life.