Over last weekend I had the privilege of preaching at the historic Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, California. This church is now guided by the terrific leadership and great preaching of my dear friend Greg Waybright. I talked about becoming radiant people. I think these wonderful folks at Lake Avenue are indeed a radiant congregation. What a wonderful time.

I am delighted to be preaching at all services this weekend, October 12-13, 2013, at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. This important, historic church is now under the strong leadership of my dear friend Greg Waybright. What a vibrant place it is. I want to invite friends and SPU alums in the area to join us for one of these services. It would be great to see you.

Some of my best friends are brain scientists. Well, actually, there is only one, my dear friend John Medina, among the brightest, most affable, generous people I know. I have learned more about the brain from John than I deserve to know, given my bent of curiosity toward culture, text, literature, theology, the biblical imagination, and such.

“I have no idea what’s going on”—that’s the way Henry Allen begins a brilliant, if discouraging, article recently in the WSJ (8/1/2013). I think he’s on to something, and his point is not generational. “I like to think,” he says, “I was especially good on the feeling-tone of the world around me.” In other words he has been a culture-watcher. I am one of those too. In some ways we all thought we had a “certain clairvoyance” to see “changes in what it feels like to be alive at any given time.” But that time has passed: “Now I have no idea what’s going on,” he repeats.

We are all just a little crazy. Did you ever stop and think about that? We like to think our quirks are shared by everyone, but they aren’t necessarily. We are profoundly unique. That’s the positive way of looking at this. We are all just on the edge of normal, and that’s mostly good.

There’s something fundamental going on with the Alex Rodriquez fiasco. It was the same thing going on when King (LeBron) James anointed himself to play with Miami. There is something unbecoming when the ego gets oversized, overcharged, beyond respectability, beyond responsibility. It makes us a little sick to watch these great athletes eaten alive by their egos. It’s a little embarrassing.

When I cut my teeth as a young leader, I tried, like most leaders, to sort out the essentials for good leadership. I was green and young and eager to do the best job I could for my university. Even in the heat of carrying out my duties, I read and studied and watched the models I came to admire. This kind of study and reflection, to begin with, is not an option for good leaders.

N. T. Wright says that we are often startled by the “long-range signposts ” cropping out in our lives, those signals of “a reality which lies deeper in God’s dark purposes than we normally imagine.” We are often surprised by the fleeting, though certain glimpse of this “reality that lies deeper.” It often shines out. It is radiant with the goodness of the Lord, to quote Jeremiah. T. S. Eliot said we go along our way and suddenly  we find ourselves “lost in a shaft of sunlight,” caught up in “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all.” These are the “hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses,” he says, of Incarnation.

On a beautiful, warm evening last week, Sharon and I attended an outdoor concert  performed by the California Philharmonic Orchestra. As the sun settled down over the San Gabriel Mountains in the background, we sat with friends and family, nibbling away at our better-than-picnic dinner, and listened to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. And then there was the Beach Boys, followed by a surprise appearance of the Beatles. What a delightful combination of music. Only in California, I suppose.

I feel like I was struck by grace this past week. Two reflections, by two writers, hit me at just the right, though unexpected, moment. Both are about how God visits us with grace from time to time, leaving us with little to say, but grateful. We come away feeling reclaimed, lifted up, pulled out of ourselves, struck.

I have been writing a poem about the night my dad died. It was a very special night for me, a moment that has shaped my going forward, a moment so powerfully about resurrection I have never been the same. I thought it might be appropriate to send this out over the blog waves on this Dad’s Day Weekend. I hope you find it meaningful.

I have just finished reading a remarkable book called The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. The author is Rod Dreher, dubbed by David Brooks as “one of the country’s most interesting bloggers.” NY Times columnist Ross Douthat calls this book “one of the best books of the spring.”

Our universities in America are the envy of the world. There are a lot of nations making every effort to catch up, China perhaps chief among them, but we remain at the top for access, research, creativity, and productivity. Actually affordability, believe it or not, ranks high too, given our aggressive approaches to financial aid. A healthy society depends on its universities.

I want to offer up a wonderful poem by the late contemporary Polish-American poet. I am fully aware there is risk in presenting such a poem because most people don’t read contemporary poetry these days. I get that. I suppose we have all been conditioned to think it is too difficult, way too nuanced, or simply irrelevant to our fast-paced reading habits.

I continue to worry about the persistent devaluing of language. The pressures of speed in the production and consumption of writing does not bode well for our future. Add to that the powerful pressures from a visually oriented society, and we have a mixture of something not good for our lives or our world.

Here today, gone tomorrow. Or rather, here for the moment, gone in an instant. That’s the reality we experience with Twitter. Twitter is an amazing phenomenon. For those of you who do not know, we all sign up to put out these posts, all limited to 140 characters (not words!). And then you “follow” people. And some “follow” you. All of this happens around the world with warp speed.

Edward Hopper is the master painter of loneliness, capturing life in the city in the early part of the twentieth century. This is the historical moment when the culture began dramatically to shift in new directions: Young women were on their own in the city for the first time; Families began to scatter about; Massive demographic movement took place. There was this pervasive sense of a world splintering into chaos. As we began to hollow out the core of  any common meaning within the culture, people were tossed into a fragmented swirl of things. A new sense of loneliness began to spread.

What is life? Most of the time we are too busy even to ask the question, but when something happens, the death of someone we love, or perhaps the eruption of violence in our streets, well, the question inevitably crops up. Interestingly, we even ask the question when we encounter something exquisitely beautiful, a sunset over Puget Sound, early tulips in bloom. All along the journey, this is a question beckoning  an answer from us.

April 23rd is said to be Shakespeare’s birthday. Not sure when you last touched down in Shakespeare’s amazing world of exquisite language, intriguing plots, and penetrating insight into the human condition, but Shakespeare is surely one of the towering figures in all of literature.

Somehow on April 15, 2013 those horrific images of carnage at the Boston Marathon threw our world off balance. Our ship began to list again. As we witnessed legs blown from bodies, bloody faces marked with fear, people holding their heads from the concussive blows, a young man ripping off his shirt to stop the bleeding leg of a young woman—well, we faced the horror and mystery of evil in our midst. We pondered in our hearts how we might, if at all, right the ship again.