Echoes and Stars

  
1. It’s funny. I love the new Adele album. But it makes me want to listen to music with some hope. Even a corner of hope. It’s a beautiful record. But there is so little hope, even between the lines. Maybe it’s just the wrong record for the moment.

2. Too bad St. Stephen didn’t have a gun.

3. I’ve started five books in the last week or so. I cannot find anything I want to read. My mind wanders. I’ve been here before. But I want something I can land in for a while. Something that made me feel like I did when discovered Berry, Dillard, Robinson, and McCarthy.

4. I loved Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God show the other night. But the best part was my 12 year old putting her head on my shoulder during.

5. It is hard to listen to Christians who have not been through the “dark night of the soul.” And those of us who have been through it can tell when someone has. The smell of the smoke of the hell walked through never really leaves you.

6. The other day I was talking with a pastor of a largish church. A pastor I respect very much. And he told me he had no idea what is going on in the larger evangelical world. It was the most refreshing thing I’d heard in a long time.

7. Have you ever stopped to think  about what a gift music is? What would it be like to have no music? No songs. No singing. No guitars strummed up into the starry night. No crackle of the dust on a record in the silence between the notes. No blues. No Psalms. No drum beats moving underneath the darkness taking us toward light and the hope of safe harbor. No lyrics that give voice to all our fears and joys and failures and dreams of better days. All of us have a sung song that makes us achingly long for something more than what we know.

8. My wife made a ham the other day that I’m gonna have to go into detox for after its all gone.

9. American Christianity thinks it’s enemy is flesh and blood.

10. It is hard to stop being a pastor.