My Commonplace Book

I’ve been listening a fascinating story about Atlantic deep-sea divers, Shadow Divers. It is the story of two men, who in pursuit of glory, mystery, and adventure, descend 200 feet to a sunken U-boat off the coast of New Jersey. They descend to re-ascend with historical artifacts and the knowledge to solve one of the [...]

I found this post at zeldman.com while looking for some website help. I wish my granddaughter Irelynd had said it–though I’m sure that the desire for a Jewish King from Bethlehem lies at the heart of every heart.
We’ve begun asking our two-year-old daughter how she’d feel about acquiring a sister or brother. [...]

Over the last few days, I’ve been working on our familiesforafrica.org website (hope to launch on 1 Jan). In the process, I’ve been wrestling with how “doing good works” requires a presence. Nothing happens when you talk; everything happens when you go and do. We’ve adopted Sierra Leone as our country and [...]

I ran across a fascinating post by Mike Metzger entitled “One More Nativity Piece.” Mike criticizes our modern retelling of Christmas–which makes the all-too-familiar tale all-too-forgettable after December 25th. He asks, “What’s missing?” Using the Christmas story from Revelation 12, he describes what is missing in these words:
The story in Revelation begins [...]

Look up, you whose eyes are fixed on this earth,
you who are captivated by the events and changes on the surface of the earth.
Look up, you who turned away from heaven to this ground
because you had become disillusioned.
Look up, you whose eyes are laden with tears,
you who mourn the loss of all that the earth [...]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer compares the coming of Christ at Christmas to a miner buried alive in a mine. The miner is extremely alert, listening for every blow and every step his rescuers are making toward him. Can you imagine, Bonhoeffer wonders, that the miner ever thought of anything “other than the approaching liberation from [...]

I’m not ready for Christmas. We’ve been gone most of the month. Yesterday, we returned home from some hard work in Iowa and some tough meetings in Virginia. And I’d like some holiday happiness–but mail needs to be answered, a Christmas letter written, inventories compiled, some websites built before 1 January, the [...]