My dad preached 3,640 sermons in his career as a Christian pastor.

That’s my math. He may figure something else.

I heard at least two thirds of those sermons.

I’m sad to say (for Dad) that the sermon I remember best is the one I grew to think of as maybe his worst.

The title of the sermon was ‘The Most Important Thing in the World’ or something like that. I remember it because Dad and I talked about the sermon the week before he gave it on a Sunday morning.

Dad started the sermon by asking: “What is the most important thing in the world?” The rest of the sermon tried out different answers to the question. Things like pleasure, popularity, and wealth.

I don’t recall, but I bet my entire haul of Christmas gifts this year that Dad used this Bible verse in the sermon: “For where your treasure is, your heart will be also” (words of Jesus Christ in Gospel of Matthew 6:21).

The...

My wife, Tracy, and I were at the kitchen table one morning not long ago.

She was scrolling emails and I was scrolling The New York Times.

This is not antisocial behavior for us.

Tracy sips her orange juice and tells me about work situations that sprung up since the night before. She supervises a large staff, so work situations pop up like a 24-hour game of Whack-a-Mole.

I sip my coffee and read the news to her.

On this morning not long ago, I read her some news I thought she would like. A new COVID vaccine from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was nearing government approval. The vaccine proved 90 percent effective at keeping people from getting COVID. The vaccine could be available within weeks.

I expected Tracy to get big eyes and say something like “that’s great!”

But she didn’t.

She got quiet. Her eyes pressed shut, her face scrunched up, her lips trembled, and her...

This year, two things have been stuck in my head.

The first is the Hamilton theme song because my son asked me to play it for him several times a day for about six months straight.

The other is a few lines the Spirit moved an old Christian teacher to write to a church of Christ in ancient Rome:

“We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. For Christ did not please himself…” (Letter to the Romans 15:1-3a).

While Hamilton is stuck in my head for good reasons (my son loves it and it’s some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life), Romans 15:1-3a is stuck in my head for reasons that are not good.

I don’t like to say it, but some of the loudest Christians I heard this year seemed to forget that Romans 15:1-3a is in their Bibles.

Rolling...

This year, Thanksgiving is going to be different.

Some customs will be the same. Mom Smith will host us at her home and she will make all of the Thanksgiving foods we love to eat.

But “customary” stops there.

We won’t see my sister-in-law and her family. They are wisely staying home in western New York.

Those of us who do gather at Mom Smith’s will do so in the back yard or on the front porch. I’m hauling our portable fire pit up there so we can have some warmth while we visit outside. Rather than ooh and ahh as we crowd over the feast at the table, Mom Smith will plate individual portions and bring them to us from inside. We will limit our stay to less than two hours.

It’s what we need to do for the health and safety of our own family.

It’s what we need to do for the health and safety of the people each of us may meet in the next couple of weeks.

It’s what we need to do for...

A few days ago, I wrote about the time I moved to Texas for grad school and the mess I made of everything while I was there.

I left a couple of details out of that story.

The first is that I didn’t do my homework before I enrolled in grad school and moved to Texas. I was bored at my job and felt like it wasn’t taking me where I wanted to go in life. So, I applied to grad school and made the decision to move to Texas without doing much research or thinking at all.

It’s worse than it sounds. I didn’t even know my graduate program was a three-year full-time graduate program until I was already a month into it!

The other detail I left out of the story is that I dropped out of grad school seven or eight months before I finally left Texas.

That means I spent several months not doing much of anything while I fell into depression and turned to charity and hand-outs just to get by.

Why...

This is the story of how my emptiest Thanksgiving turned out to be my fullest.

The year was 1998. I was a senior at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.

That year, as always, my dad and mom hosted a big Thanksgiving celebration at their home in Ashland, Ohio.

In the Irwin family, “Thanksgiving” means “full.” To this day, my parents fill their home with family and friends. A place is set at every square inch of the table. Mom starts every Thanksgiving Day by serving a huge family breakfast at the table. Around 10 o'clock in the morning, she lays out a “goodie table” that stays in the living room all day. Around 3 o'clock, Mom serves a gigantic Thanksgiving feast followed by pecan and pumpkin pie. Leftovers come back out in time for the Irwin family’s Thanksgiving evening tradition: Watching ‘Home Alone’ (with “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style commentary from my two sisters).

Life is full of distractions.

You can’t avoid them.

They choose when and where to come at you.

Some of them come from within you.

Have you ever tried to sit is silence and still your mind for even five minutes?

What happened?

So, if you think you will find a place to be free of distractions, give up.

The best you can do is make friends with your distractions.

“But what if I don’t want to be friends with my distractions?”

Good question and you have a point.

We may not be able to stop distractions from coming at us in life. But we can choose more of what kind of distractions we will be around.

What distractions are likely to come at you at Disney World versus the ones that are likely to come at you in Las Vegas?

When you choose where to be in life, you choose what kinds of distractions are likely to come up most often in life.

I once worked at a place where my coworkers...

One of the best blessings of being a dad is how the Spirit teaches me at the exact same time that I teach my son.

He is eight years old. Anyone who raised kids knows how they want what they want and they want it now.

It’s no use telling a little kid to “be patient.” Kids don’t “come out of the box” with patience already in their “operating systems.”

Patience comes with years and years of having no choice but to wait.

One of the things I hear myself say to my son at least once or twice a week is: “Son, life is all about waiting. As long as you live, you’re going to be waiting for something. You might as well learn how to enjoy it.”

The first time I heard myself say that, I knew it wasn’t just for my son. The Spirit was saying it to me, too.

Life is waiting.

I cannot think of any time in my life that I wasn’t waiting for something. What about you?

Some kinds of waiting are...

My dad baptized me on March 4, 1987. A few minutes later, he scribbled out a baptism certificate and handed it to me in his church office.

This is the date of my baptism.

But the day I was “born again” was a date that I can’t figure.

I know it was sometime in January or February of 1998. It was early on a weekday morning and I was vacuuming one of the wide hallways in the Jim Bill McInteer Bible Building at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.

I was in my fourth year of college. I earned spending money by vacuuming the Bible building every morning before the sun came up.

That morning, I was in deep distress.

A few days earlier, my mom and I had an argument about something in the Bible. I don’t remember exactly what, but it was one of those things that the Bible does not spell out in black and white. It was one of those things that people who read the Bible can read a lot of...

Jesus of Nazareth was a victim of politics.

Here are the facts:

He stood trial before a provincial political body that heard political charges against him.

He then stood trial before an imperial politician who heard the same political charges. When that politician hesitated to condemn Jesus, the provincial leaders found a way to push a political hot button that fired up a mass political demonstration. The imperial politician gave in to the political threats from the mob and provincial leaders and signed the execution order.

The imperial government executed Jesus of Nazareth for political crimes (insurrection and/or treason).

What some accounts mention is that political enemies conspired together to bring about Jesus’s execution.

The imperial politicians had contempt for the provincial politicians.

The provincial politicians hated and resented the imperial politicians.

Two...