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...

I don't know if you've noticed this but there are a lot of misconceptions about heaven. I had my own misconceptions too, and I was basically born in a pew. Growing up as a kid I remember hearing different things about heaven and maybe you did too. One of the first ideas about heaven that I recall is that heaven is a perpetual worship service. Heaven was like being in some large stadium made out of clouds and packed full of people. And in heaven all we do is stay in the heavenly stadium and sing. And sing. And sing. And sing . . . for all eternity. It is the worship service that never ends. I don’t know if there will be screens so we can all see the words, yet I bet the sound system will be killer.  I also bet that there will be someone complaining about how loud the music is and another person complaining that they don’t know the words to songs. I love music. I enjoy all kinds of music. Yet the thought of standing around for all eternity in a never-ending worship service just s...

Any time you start to discuss the end times things get weird fast. Mention the end times at church, work or with your family and you will get flooded with all kinds of theories. You will hear words like tribulation, rapture and prophecy. You might also hear thoughts on the antichrist, blood red moons, the State of Israel, microchips and secretive government programs. In all honesty, discussions about the end times can be exhausting, confusing and overwhelming.  Yet one of the things that I've noticed in having conversations about the end times is that it tends to be governed by our questions. The questions that we bring to the discussion usually dictate the conversations that we have. This is especially true when we bring our questions about the end times to the Bible and demand an answer. Those questions create a kind of lens or point of view that the Bible might not even be interested in answering.  The types of questions that typically swirl around about the end times take ...

I believe that being a local church minister is, hands down, one of the most complex, stressful, joyful, and totally bonkers positions one can hold. There is no educational degree that one can undertake to be considered fully prepared for ministry.  The late Eugene H. Peterson in his book The Pastor: A Memoir says “A job is an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated. It is pretty easy to decide whether a job has been completed or not. It is pretty easy to tell whether a job is done well or badly. But a vocation is not a job in that sense. I can be hired to do a job, paid a fair wage if I do it, dismissed if I don't. But I can't be hired to be a pastor, for my primary responsibility is not to the people I serve but to the God I serve.” I think that most folks in church ministry would agree with Mr. Peterson’s sentiment. Folks often go into church ministry seeking to follow God and make a difference in the lives of others. At the same time there have been many...

     I believe that marriage, especially Christian marriage, should turn you into the person that you otherwise never would have been. Paul writes in Philippians 2:5 “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!”       A host of scholarly papers, commentaries and Sunday messages have covered Philippians 2:5 thoroughly. Whatever one might say about this passage one thing is for sure, Paul is offering a statement on how Jesus wants things to happen. What does Jesus want? According to Paul, Jesus would really like it if we didn’t take advantage of one another. Instead, Jesus would really like it if we wer...

Outside it was a hot day. I don’t really enjoy hot days. I like fall weather. My alabaster white skin just burns to a crisp on hot sunny days. Inside there was a lot of emotional uncomfortableness. I don’t really like emotional uncomfortableness either. It has taken some learning and practice to become better able to remain in the midst of emotional uncomfortableness without feeling the need to resolve things. Yet this story comes from a time when I had not learned healthy coping skills, personal boundaries and the ingredients to a healthy marriage. Perhaps you have heard the saying “If momma ain’t happy, then nobody is happy.” Well in my case when momma (ex-wife) wasn’t happy I took on the responsibility to fix the situation. And there were a lot of times momma wasn’t happy. She told me her unhappiness was often tied to her self diagnosed OCD. Whatever the case I had put myself in the position of attempting to maintain homeostasis in the household. When there was conflict I attempted ...