Chip Shots

As many of you will know, it was my privilege to perform the wedding ceremony for our son, Kurt, and his new bride, Lindsay, last weekend. What a blessing! In the past four years, I’ve performed three weddings for our children, a funeral for my father, and welcomed the birth of our first grandchild. “Marry, bury, and baptize,” as my college roommate used to speak about the ministry. Though I didn’t baptize my granddaughter, I can’t help but reflect on the deeply spiritual nature of these seminal life moments. It is a blessed privilege to have shared them with my family. In the midst of a life filled with events, most of which matter little, these are the moments that remind us how precious, transitory, beautiful — and big — life is. I feel like Tinkerbell, whose feeling of love was so big she had to grow up to feel it. I don’t suppose  Hook , the source of that Tinkerbell scene, is a great movie, but it looms large in our family’s imagination. We first saw it on the  VCR ...

Psalm 64 starts off predictably enough. David is in trouble – again. His enemy is out to get him. They’re hatching secret plots (1-2). Like a sniper’s arrows, their words ambush him without warning (3-4). David imagines their private thoughts: “Who will see us?” (5-6). They’ve covered their tracks. No one will know. And then the line that catches us by surprise: “For the inward mind and heart of a man are deep” (6). Pause a moment to think about those words. Long before the emergence of modern psychology, David wrestles with the inner mysteries of the human heart. “The inward mind and heart of a man are deep.” These ancient words speak the truth about the depths of our own human hearts. Like David’s enemies, our hearts lay “secret snares”, thinking no one will find out. Often our secrets are so deep that we don’t even recognize them ourselves. Our capacity for self-deception seems limitless. How often, for example, have we found ourselves criticizing others for actions and attit...