For many years, it has been our practice (my wife and I) to write a Christmas letter that includes one page of devotional thoughts about Christmas, and a second page of family news.  This post is taken from this year’s letter -I hope you enjoy it, or at least find it helpful.  Please note that you are more than welcome to sign up for our occasional newsletter - and then you can get the family news, too!   When you get to the sign up form, click on News from Ed and Susanna, and any of the other newsletters you would like to subscribe to.  

Here are my thoughts on Christmas, 2011:

Christmas.  It is a great story that we never tire of: The manger scene, stars, angels, shepherds, wise men. Underneath the story is the best news any of us will ever hear:  Immanuel – “God is with us”. In the words of John’s gospel, “the Word became flesh and lived among us…”

What we kind of lose track of, I think, is what it took to make this miracle happen.  Bringing a baby into the world is not easy…
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courtesy Thomas Schneider

This is the message we have just sent from Care of Creation to our friends and partners around the world. It’s topic is appropriate to Our Father’s World friends and readers, I think. May you have a truly blessed and deeply meaningful Holy Weekend whereever you are!

“Easter People in a Good Friday world.”

This phrase grabbed the attention of a few people earlier this week – in part, I suppose, because it was heard on NPR. Host Michele Norris was interviewing writer Ann Lamott about Easter. Citing the tension she feels between the world as it should be and the world as it is, Lamott quoted another author, Barbara Johnson: “We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world.”

Of course, most of the people around us are actually Good Friday people living in a Good Friday world. Read more »

Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan? Read more »

We who advocate for creation care tend to overlook some important connections between the central beliefs of the Christian faith and our obligation to care for the world God has placed in our hands.  Christmas – when we celebrate the Incarnation, literally the ‘enfleshment’ of God in human form – is one of those overlooked connections.  The following is an excerpt from my book, Our Father’s World, chapter 3:

In middle-school and early high school, one of my children went through a serious “I have a crush” phase.  Her idol was a singer with a popular contemporary Christian music group.  An enormous poster hung over her bed, and every song he released was purchased, listened to, memorized and sung – over and over and over.  One year the group was scheduled to sing in Chicago, just three or four hours from Madison.  And it happened that the concert was close enough to my daughter’s birthday that we could make her birthday party be a trip to see her idol on stage.  So we bought the tickets.  We even paid a bit extra so that she and her friends could stand in line before the concert to meet him in person.  The great day came and everything, for once, went off without a hitch.  We arrived at the concert venue in good time, stood in line, got our autographs, put in the earplugs, and enjoyed the concert.  It was a highlight of her young life.  My ears are still ringing. Read more »

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here.

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I live in a college town in the US – Madison, WI.  Our university is known for “partying”, and one of the annual events loved by students and despised by residents is known as the Mifflin Street Block Party, with a history that goes back to the days of Viet Nam war protests.  The party is normally leaves behind an incredible mess that the city has to clean up, at considerable expense. Read more »

This is a continuation of a series of articles leading up to the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that begins in Cape Town South Africa on October 15.  Today’s post is a continuation of the last as we move from the Fall to Redemption. Find the whole series to date here.

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Like many kids, young and old, I used to enjoy playing with dominos.  Not playing the game, you understand, but playing with the tiles.  Setting them up in long chains, and when all was ready, carefully knocking the first one over.  If all went according to plan, each domino would knock the next one in the line, and one by one, all would fall over.  We used that image above to describe the series of relationships shattered by Adam and Eve’s disobedience.  As we think of how they are restored by redemption through Jesus, the same domino imagery is useful again.  As the domino tiles fall, each pushes on the next, and eventually all are lying flat.  But if you want to pick them up, you have to start with the first one that fell over, not with the last one. They have to be set up in the order in which they fell. The same is true as we begin to restore relationships broken by sin. Read more »