This morning, a friend of mine sent along some bad news that inspired me.

It wasn’t bad news on the level of “your cancer is back,” but one of those little things (a child with a fever) that can ruin plans for an entire day.

I thought: One of the surest signs that we’re alive is that we have trouble. As long as kids are getting fevers, speakers are canceling at the last minute, and spouses are angry because of misunderstandings, I must be alive.

The moment these things stop, I’m no longer here. I’m no longer living.

Jesus said it himself: “In this world you will have trouble” (Gospel of John 16:33.

And, if I take Jesus at his word, I know that I will have abundant trouble. After all, he promised abundant life (Gospel of John 10:10). If trouble is a vital sign that we are alive, then abundant trouble may be a sign that we are living life abundantly.

Jesus promised abundant life...

Photo by Harry Miller on Unsplash

Have you ever been to a dead or dying church?

I’ve been to a lot of them. A couple of years ago, I took an offer to preach at a congregation in a fast-growing suburb of a Midwestern city.

When I arrived on Sunday morning, I found a big church building that seemed to be less than 30 years old. I passed through the front doors into a lobby the size of a gymnasium, but not one person was in sight.

I found the auditorium. It had four sections of pews that looked like they could seat 400 to 500 people. But as worship began, 20 people (or 30 by “preacher count”) huddled in part of one section.

I could almost hear the ghosts of the hundreds who once sang there.

…

My wife and I joined a dynamic suburban Church of Christ congregation the year we got married (2008). When we first started going to church there, it took three Sunday morning worship...

Much, much harder than I thought.

When I was a kid, I thought that following Jesus was about not doing things that are bad. Somehow, I learned that the baddest of the bad things were cussing, drinking, smoking, and any trace of sexual pleasure.

It’s no wonder I thought that my teen years would be the time when following Jesus would be the hardest. James Dobson told me so.

I did indeed give in to temptation in my teen years. I said a few dirty words (when nobody was listening). I tried a beer or two (and didn’t like it). I smoked a few cigarettes (until I threw up one night and never smoked again). And I fooled around with my girlfriend (but got dumped before “premarital sex” could happen).

All those teen temptations went away when I went away to a Christian college. There, none of my friends cussed, drank, smoked, or even tried to get to first base with their girlfriends.

I...

I titled this post “a Christmas letter in July” because the first part will read like the letters my parents send out with their Christmas cards every year.

Yes, my parents still send out a “Christmas letter” (and it’s delightful).

If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, a Christmas letter is what people used to send before email and social media. A family’s annual Christmas letter reports all the big news from the year before.

The big news in this “Christmas letter in July” from the Irwin family is that my dad’s cancer is back being gone for five years. The difference is that this time, it is all over his body and not just in one place. The doctors tell us that the best they can do is make Dad comfortable and try to prolong his life using treatments like chemotherapy and immunotherapy. These treatments could keep him alive for a few months or a few years.

I feel bad...

What, to the white man, is Juneteenth?

Before I try to answer that, let’s look at a little history.

Frederick Douglass (1817 - 1895) was a black former slave who became a leader in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States.

In 1852, he spoke to a mostly-white audience that gathered to celebrate Independence Day. He gave what history calls the What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July speech.

Douglass asked: Why should black people (in the year 1852) celebrate the Fourth of July when the laws of the land denied them “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?

Not many years later, black Americans finally had a reason to hope that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence could apply to them, too.

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation became the law of the land. The proclamation freed all slaves in rebel states. As U.S...

I have “Benadryl brain” this morning.

Last midnight, allergies had me sneezing and snorting (and not sleeping).

I got up to look for relief and all I could find in the house was Benadryl.

I took it. I knew that it would put me to sleep and stop the allergy symptoms.

I also knew that the drug’s effects would wear off in the night and that I would awake sneezing and snorting again. But at midnight, I decided to get some sleep and deal with morning in the morning.

It’s morning. My allergies were up with the sun.

The effects of the Benadryl wore off, but the side effects wear on.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, my dad had an old Pontiac that gave us more reasons to pray than almost anything else in our lives. In the cold northern Ohio weather, depending on that old Pontiac to get us to school in the morning was like playing “tardy bell Russian roulette.”

On February mornings...

I’m writing on fumes this morning.

It’s 6 a.m. on the day after my son’s last day of second grade.

I was his teacher here at home all year. Oh, how I cherish my time with him while he is young! But, oh, how I counted down the days until this school year ended!

It had to end for the sake of his education and our relationship!

I put most of my “thinking and writing energy” this week into an important and urgent fundraising appeal for the nonprofit I lead. Like all small nonprofits that live hand to mouth, we need money and we need it now. I did my best to write an appeal that would get people who need their own money now to give some of it to us.

I also wrote a column for our church bulletin.

I’m writing on fumes this morning.

Why am I telling you this?

It’s a trick. A writer who has “writer’s block” knows he has to start writing to clear the blockage.

Just start writing.

...

Memorial Day was big in Ashland, Ohio, the small town where I grew up.

It seemed like everyone in town came out to crowd Main Street for the annual Memorial Day parade.

The stars of that parade were the military veterans who passed by.

Whenever they marched by, a hush came over the crowd. Then, loud cheers. The parade made its way to the town cemetery, where a ceremony took place: Prayers, the reading of names of Ashland’s own military martyrs, Taps, and a 21-gun salute.

Memorial Day is not the same since I moved away from Ashland 20 years ago. Back home, they know how to do the “memorial” part right.

I wish all of America would keep Memorial Day the way we did back in Ashland, but I would like to add one thing.

Let’s honor and remember our military martyrs, but let’s honor and remember another group of American martyrs along with them.

Let me tell you the story of Viola...

I officiated a wedding last weekend.

The groom is an old friend of mine. Fifteen years ago, his mom and stepdad let me crash at their house after I crashed and burned out as a church minister and seminarian.

After I imploded my life in just under a year of going to grad school and working with a small church in Texas, I snuck back into Michigan under cover of darkness one wintry February night.

I was homeless, jobless, and penniless.

Oh, and I’d burned bridges back here in Michigan.

About the only one left to me was the one that led to the basement of a mixed family home in suburban Detroit.

That’s where I met the groom. He was only 11 when I came to stay with his family. He didn’t know that the 30-year old man now living in his basement was a church-splitting, friend-betraying, money-wasting, seminary-failing talker who finally couldn’t talk his way out of the mess he made...

That’s a promise straight from the mouth of the Christ (Gospel of John 16:33.

Some mornings when I scan the headlines, I feel like my body is being stretched on a rack. I can barely live through a day when I don’t find out that one of my “good guys” did something very bad. I can barely make it through one 24-hour news cycle without someone proving unfit for the hope I put in him. What starts out black and white gets stirred to gray.

And I am troubled. So, so troubled.

But the Christ promised that would happen. I wonder why we don’t talk about that promise more often. It’s right there in red letters in the Bible:

“In this world you will have trouble…”

So what are we to do?

Fight like hell?

Move far up into the back country, to some place off the grid?

Stick our heads in the sand?

Vote for the new lords and saviors the political parties thrust on us?

None of the above.

We...