Sturtz Stuff

Who knows that the year 2024 will bring. Yet there are some issues that I see for 2024.  More of us are bowling alone Near the end of 2019 the word COVID became a household name. COVID wasn’t just a medical issue. COVID impacted all areas of our lives. The United States, from 2019 to 2020, saw the largest spike in mortality in 100 years.1   We lost a lot of people. Have we already forgotten the daily death toll counts each night on the news? There are a lot of folks who are now either a little more alone in life or totally alone in life due to the impact of COVID. In other words there are a lot more lonely people in our communities. Yet loneliness is not just due to high death rates.  COVID highlighted something that has been going on in our culture for many years. Loneliness. In 2023 the US Surgeon General published a major report on the epidemic of loneliness in our culture. The report calls attention to the fact that Americans are not just feeling more alone they...

Maybe like me you have heard someone talk about the end times. Perhaps you have learned about the end times from social media posts or stuff your family members have talked about. If you went to church or church summer camp then you could have heard about the end times. As a kid who grew up going to church I heard about the end times a lot. As a kid hearing about the end times was often scary and weird. Talk of the end times often tends to start with a look at how bad everything is in society. It then takes all the horrible things happening and uses it to predict a future that will be even worse. The good news about all the bad news is that all of the bad needs to happen because it means Jesus is about to return. All you have to do is watch any news show and you can quickly learn about all of the horrible things happening in the world. Yet news shows are not out to form and shape anyone into Christlikness. They also tend to completely overlook all the good happening. In other words, ta...