Category Archives: Writing
Informed Apathy
It’s hard to imagine how different life was two hundred years ago. The telegraph had not yet been invented. Information only travelled as fast as the person who carried it, and it was valued in proportion to how far it had to be transported. Local news was abundant and travelled quickly, and it usually directly [...]
C. S. Lewis: Longing
In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by [...]
Normal
Ryan met me in the parking lot of the Family Video on a Saturday afternoon. We went inside carrying chairs and popcorn, set them up in front of one of those corner televisions in the back, and watched the movie that was playing as though it was our living [...]
Harelip Prayers
Every Sunday morning the Christian radio station in Waterloo broadcasts the live service of a small church in the area. When we had band practice before church, Matt usually picked me up right as this church’s band was playing. As we scanned the stations, we’d sometimes go right past their service, but other times we’d [...]
Wonder
It was late afternoon, probably sometime in November, and I was reading a book. The sun had reached the point in its descent where if I had just then started reading I might have turned on the lamp, but I could still read for a little while longer by the natural light coming in the [...]
A Celebration of Excellence: Two Rivers Church
In August of 2003, some friends and I came to Des Moines for a Lifehouse concert. We decided to go down a few hours early to visit Willowbrook Bible Camp, since Christy’s dad was directing the high school camp that week and a few of our younger siblings were among the campers. We ate dinner [...]
A Celebration of Excellence: Bethany Bible Chapel
I said a few weeks ago that I have been a part of seven different churches in my life. What I didn’t say is that six of those churches have been in the past six years. But from the day I was born until the day I went off to college, I went to Bethany [...]
A Celebration of Excellence: Kaio Church
Shortly after we were married and living back in Iowa, Amanda and I felt called to leave my home church and help out at Kaio Church, a new plant in Cedar Falls. Kaio was started in 2006 for one reason: there are still unsaved people in the city. Their singular vision as a church was [...]
A Celebration of Excellence: Fairbluff Bible Chapel
In the fall of 2006, Amanda and I decided to move down to the Charlotte area for the semester so she could finish her degree. She only needed six gen-ed classes to graduate, and community college in North Carolina costs about a tenth of what it costs in Iowa. Since we were both still working [...]
A Celebration of Excellence: The Great Adventure Church
I attended The Great Adventure Church during my years at Emmaus Bible College in Dubuque, Iowa. As a “Bible college town”, Dubuque had a very interesting church dynamic. There were four churches in town that were led by Emmaus faculty, and while they all shared the same theological beliefs, they were vastly different in structure [...]
