Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Awhile back on my Facebook page, I said that I was writing something about critical race theory.

I told the truth, but what started out as one blog post turned into drafts of five posts.

I write to think. So, the more I wrote, the more I thought.

The more I thought, the more I wrote.

Here’s what it was like for me:

I went to college in Searcy, Arkansas. I had a friend, Chris, from California.

Chris asked a girl for a date. Rather than take her to the local coffee shop in Searcy, he planned to drive her two hours away to Memphis.

This was the 1990s. Nobody had GPS or mobile phones. Chris got someone to scribble directions to Memphis on a scrap of paper. He borrowed a car, picked up his date, and hit the road.

But Chris missed a turn. He kept going on the four-lane highway until it turned into a two-lane highway. Then a two-lane...

Photo by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash

“I don’t make a damn! I don’t make a damn!”

Is he singing what I think he’s singing? I thought to myself.

I strained to listen.

“I don’t make a damn! I don’t make a damn!”

Yep, I thought as I girded my loins for the “teachable moment” that was upon me.

My eight-year old, Daniel, and I were walking the dog. Daniel drifted into his own thoughts and fell a few paces behind me. I was lost in my own thoughts until I picked up on what he was singing to himself.

“I don’t make a damn! I don’t make a damn!”

Parents, you can guess what happened next.

Daniel knew he was caught. He tried the old “it’s about a beaver dam,” but he threw it at me like a hail mary pass when the game is already lost.

So, we had one of those talks. I told him (again) how Jesus taught that a person is what comes out of him (Gospel of Matthew 15:11).

“Damnation is nonstop...

The worst thing you can say to someone is: “You shouldn’t feel that way.”

Nothing takes away a person’s personhood faster than someone like a guardian or hero figure or teacher telling them not to feel what they feel.

Human being is human feeling.

I am barely holding back tears as I sit alone in a coffee house. I don’t want the barista to see a grown man “ugly crying” at the table in the back.

And I don’t want to “ugly cry” because I’m afraid I would drown in the feeling. It’s so big that it makes me feel small. Like I’m little again.

As I sat here trying to figure out what to do with all this fear and sadness, these words came to mind: “Man of sorrows.”

He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering (sorrows) and acquainted with infirmity; as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account (Book of Isaiah 53:3).

Christians...

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.

...