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So I was having lunch the other day with two wonderful women, women who like lunch with vodka, and so I like having lunch with them, because I like them, I like vodka, and I like lunch.

On another note, one of my mentors, Murray Haar, at the peak of craziness post-accident, told me that one of his favorite NT tales is of the woman who anointed Jesus.

John Westerhoff wrote:
“Stewardship is what we do after we say we believe, that is, after we give our love, loyalty, and trust to God, from whom each and every aspect of our lives comes as a gift. As members of God’ s household, we are subject to God’ s economy or stewardship, that is, God’ s plan to reconcile the whole world and bring creation to its proper end.” (Grateful and Generous Hearts, Atlanta: St. Luke’s Press, 1997, p. 20.)
I know that I’ve blogged about Westerhoff’s words before.

We found out last week that my mother has pancreatic cancer.

So the kidlets and I were in Target this morning, racing to get an errand done between church services and a meeting we wanted to attend.

there’s more to do with our lives than preserve them.

The below appeared in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper today.  I’m reposting it here, because it’s a Holy Saturday-ish set of musings.

Good Friday is a High Holy Day in the Christian tradition, and I would argue is half of a singular event: Cross/Resurrection.

In December, 1967, John Updike was writing “Talk of the Town” for the New Yorker, and he spent most of that “Talk of the Town” column talking about the “Umbrella Man.”  He said that his learning about the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research, there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality.  If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on.  It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s other level where everything is really weird.
My father sends me an awful lot of good stuff for blog ponderings.  Far too long ago, he sent me a link to a New York Times video about the Umbrella Man.  It’s a short film by Errol Morris, an interview with Josiah “Tink” Thompson, quoted above.  He’s an academic-become-gumshoe, and while not all people agree with his methods or his madness, he raises curious questions, and I like people who raise curious questions.

People aren’t always so sure what OMG is.

Question: It may be semantics, but leaving church and leaving congregational religion may not be the same.  Consider–if I woman has been for whatever reasons in abusive marriage(s) and decides that marriage is not a good thing, that is not a declaration that all men are bad, but a declaration that marriage is not the way she chooses to relate to men.  It may be that people who leave congregations/church (one word for both in their mind) are seeking a different way to relate to God.

It’s 8:04 on Tuesday morning, and I’m sitting in the waiting room at the hospital after just sending my son off to yet another surgery.

As much as I have recently made a case for Advent, and then for Christmas, you might have expected that I would write something about the season of Epiphany, now over a week past.

Today we awoke to a Christmas Day for the picture books.

Those are Holden Caulfield’s words, not mine, from J.D. Salinger’s book The Catcher in the Rye.

OMG loves to encourage people to ask the theological questions.

I am decorating for Advent.

Below is a link and then the full text of a piece I wrote for our Sioux Falls local paper, the Argus Leader. It was published this last Saturday.

Except when it doesn’t.

Last week, I got this query:
Hello Anna,