Recently in 2014 Category

Greetings to you, my family in Christ, sisters and brothers, saints and sinners.

Do you remember your dreams? I don't always remember all of them, but there is one recurring theme I have in one of them, and it is probably one of those that a dream analyst would have a fun time with. In it I am somehow flying. I don't always know how it starts. Sometimes I just go up through the roof. Sometimes it's out a window. Sometimes I'll just find myself flying. And I'll be very high up in the air, and I will see all sorts of landscapes below me. Maybe city blocks, maybe farmlands, maybe roads. Sometimes ocean, sometimes mountains. In any case I am high in the air, and there's a feeling of complete weightlessness as I'm moving forward at a really fast speed.

And then what happens sometimes is that I realize at some point that I should not be able to fly at all, that it is entirely impossible, and I suddenly begin to drop out of the air. If I am lucky, I will realize I am dreaming right away, and wake up without any terrible fear. If not, I wind up waking up with a start, my heart racing, and grateful that I have not just wound up as a splat on the ground on whatever landscape I had just been flying over.

I don't know if other people have dreams like this, where you are flying or maybe doing some other impossible thing and and you remember that it is not some thing that you should be able to do and you are suddenly no longer able to do it. I have found in the past when I have had dreams like that it usually relates to the fact that I am doing some thing in my life that I had not ever expected possible and there I am, doing it.

Greetings to you, my family in Christ, sisters and brothers, saints and sinners. Children of God.

I'm coming to you this Sunday after having spent a day after having returned from a four day mission redeveloper training in Minneapolis, so I may be a bit jet-lagged. Although, to be honest with you, it helped me with getting up early this morning so I could get over here in time for service.

Now if you're not familiar with what the ELCA defines as a mission redeveloper, let me give you some bit of insight about it. As you may be aware, and I am not sure that there are many of us who haven't become aware of it, church attendance for mainline churches has dropped tremendously over the last couple of decades. And at the same time ELCA, "Evangelical Lutheran Church of America" has been reevaluating its mission.