Intersections

We are starting an adventure today, also known as my first preaching series! We will be taking a deep dive into the Gospel of John chapter 6 to see how food and faith intersect to bring us closer together as a community. I hope you came here today hungry for ice cream, but most importantly, JESUS! We will be checking out the first 21 verses for this first week. Here they are, in the Contemporary English Version:  “Jesus crossed Lake Galilee, which was also known as Lake Tiberias. A large crowd had seen him work miracles to heal the sick, and those people went with him. It was almost time for the Jewish festival of Passover, and Jesus went up on a mountain with his disciples and sat down. When Jesus saw the large crowd coming toward him, he asked Philip, “Where will we get enough food to feed all these people?” He said this to test Philip since he already knew what he was going to do. Philip answered, “Don’t you know that it would take almost a year’s wages just to buy only a little br

       Wandering can be good for the soul. As Shakespeare once wrote, “ All that glitters is not gold .” Put another way by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings , “Not all who wander are lost.” Tolkien was describing a character running from his rightful place as king. He knew his destiny, but it carried such weight he was not ready to fulfill his calling.        In my life, I have been a wanderer. After being involved in church during high school and looking to get into leadership, I was too self-involved or did not want to submit to the great weight of the role that I felt led toward, feeling not worthy of the responsibility, much like Tolkien’s character, although obviously not to that degree. I dropped out of many things in my early twenties and was suffering from undiagnosed anxiety and depression. It took another decade and, unfortunately, much more pain for me, not to mention therapy and healing, to get me to the point where I am in front of you. In my abandoning faith, it wa

     Experiencing a calling famously brings about the imagery of clouds opening and bright lights from the heavens proclaiming a change in someone’s life. As dramatic as that is, that was not my experience, and I’d like to think the overdramatic kind is more of an exception than the rule.     Well - let’s start with that - what IS a calling? You know, this was one of the hardest things to be able to narrow down. My research shows you how much of a nerd I am - defining a calling is so personal and unique that trying to have a generalized definition of it is like nailing jello to the wall.      But - in the interest of clarity, being called means that you are being set apart for a specific purpose; it can happen in any dimension of your life. For example, I knew I was called to marry my beautiful and kind wife, Tadjena. We were called to be parents to our two energetic children, Alison & Aaron. But a calling, most of the time, is for a holy purpose, despite the secular world trying