Be Cézanne, not Picasso

Be Cézanne, not Picasso

When it comes to art, I have two basic rules: 1) It has to look nice and 2) I’m not paying more than $60 for it. This makes me uniquely unqualified to appreciate high art. We were at the Dallas Museum of Art a few years back, and we were looking at a lot of...
To the Angel of the Church in…

To the Angel of the Church in…

Imagine reading through Christ’s instructions to the seven churches of Revelation, only to get to the end of chapter three and discover an eighth message to an eighth congregation. Your congregation. What if it was there, plain as day, and you’d just never...
What We Do in the Storms

What We Do in the Storms

I will always have a lot of respect for Job. He catches a lot of flak for his behavior toward the end of the book, and it turns out, yeah, when you’re at the lowest point of your life and dealing with three insensitive and unhelpful “friends,” some...
Five Words

Five Words

In Washington, DC, in a museum just down the road from the Smithsonian, there’s an old, beat-up piece of wood on display. It’s an important piece of wood, although you might not know it just by looking at it. On its surface, which is covered in gouges from...
The Gap

The Gap

So often, Pentecost feels to me like the last ellipsis before we trail off into deafening silence. We have this meaningful, tangible build-up to Passover, then right into Unleavened Bread, then we pause for a bit, then Pentecost, and then… And then nothing. For a...