Sturtz Stuff

Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian[a] eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.” 30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. 31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32 This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descenda...

We were all born into a world that is in love with differences. The love language that we have all learned is that of enmity towards those who are different. By the time I was a teenager I had been to Sunday School long enough to learn that all other churches except for those from my tradition were suspect. Their doctrine was wrong. Their view of the Bible was wrong. The church I went to emphasized, almost every Sunday, that our community did things in the manner of the early church. That made us special. Because our doctrine and practices were better, my church was in some sense superior to say a Baptist church or a Methodist church. We knew who the real Christians were. In fact my church community could give you the book, chapter and verse, from the Bible, as to why we were better.  The central question of faith for me as a kid was who is in and who is out. Faith was a debate and faithfulness was about being both right and self-righteous about being right. This kind of posturing ...

When my youngest son Austin was in the third grade I received a notice from his school that the money in his lunch account had all been used. That really annoyed me. I had just put enough money in his account to last a long while. Yet, here is this notice that more money is needed. Is it just me or when your kids are in school you feel like an ATM machine as a parent. Anyway, here is this notice asking for yet more money. I wasn’t happy about that and I began to make up a story in my head based on a series of assumptions.  Obviously Austin had gone on some kind of a school lunch spending spree. He eats breakfast at home. Why would he eat breakfast again at school? How many cookies are the school lunch workers allowing him to purchase? I had questions that were all based on a bunch of assumptions. I decided that Austin’s foolishness needed to come to an end. I was going to get to the bottom of Austin’s lack of financial responsibility and teach him a lesson. When I asked Austin why ...