Blog Posts

  • When God Says “It is Good”

    When God Says “It is Good”

    It has been twelve weeks since we lost Penny and her death still weighs on our hearts daily. In a moment of tiredness I miss the daughter I never got to properly know. When my other three children are playing I grieve that they will not experience her joining them in their roller coaster ride…

  • I’m Retiring “Post-Christian” from My Vocabulary

    I have been using the phrase “post-Christian” in sermons for a while now to try to help my congregants navigate our society. But I have decided to retire it. I had been using the term because it does accurately capture the loss of a “center” in American culture. This center consisted of concepts such as…

  • The Comfort of Concrete

    It’s Spring in the Ozarks and that means thunderstorms and tornado warnings. When the storms come my children will comfort themselves beneath their warm blankets and clutch their fuzzy stuffies. They do this because they are children and they don’t know any better. They don’t know that the only thing their blankets can provide is…

  • Katie Writes, too – Thoughts on Comfort

    Katie’s thoughts on comfort following the loss of our daughter.

  • The Words I Said At Penny’s Funeral

    When we found out the week after Christmas that Penny had a serious heart defect, we were faced with the possibility that she would die. It was hard as a father to take that. We want our children to live. But we determined to the best of our ability to be good parents to Penny…