Sturtz Stuff

The medical staff quietly and somberly removed all the medical lines and devices from the 48-hour-old baby. The baby's mother and father wanted to hold their child for the first time. Removing all the medical devices meant that their child would live only a few moments. Holding your child for the first time should be a joyful occasion. Instead of this moment being a kind of introduction between parent and child it was a goodbye. The baby's body was simply not set up to survive and thrive.  After removing all the medical equipment the little one was wrapped in a blanket and gently handed into the arms of the mother. The room went silent as the mother softly repeated "Mommy and Daddy love you" while she wept. The baby's father wept and kissed his newborn on the forehead. Other family members in the room started to cry as well. Once the little one had passed the family gathered together to pray. After composing himself, one of the older men in the family offered a pr...

The brother kept yelling "I did this" as I opened the door to one of the hospital family consultation rooms. Maybe you have sat in a room like this and received some not-so-good news. Rooms such as these tend to be basic. A few not-so-comfy chairs, a drab paint job, and odd abstract artwork on the walls.  I had asked the family members, who had been seated in the ER waiting area, to follow me to the family room. I told them that the doctor wanted to give them an update on how their loved one was doing. The family gathered up their belongings and nervously began to follow me. The family consisted of two adults, a baby, and two girls. One of the girls was the daughter of the patient that the doctor needed to give an update on.  She was a cute little girl. Probably about four or five years old. She had messy wavy short blond hair and green eyes. She was wearing a pale pink shirt with little white flower prints and a matching pair of pants. She had a pair of Crocs-style pink shoe...

Here is a story of two men that we find standing in the holy ancient temple of Jerusalem. What each one did in the temple was different and also reflects our own attitudes. Which man best represents our actions, beliefs and attitudes? The two men were contemporaries. Both were famous, rich, and intelligent. Both were industrious and intimately involved with God’s people. We are talking about people not too terribly different from ourselves. In our time we might say of them that they were people who went to church, respected and read the Bible but their actions lead them down very different paths. The two men are Uzziah the King and Isaiah the prophet. Uzziah ruled in Jerusalem from 783 BCE to 742 BCE. He came to power when he was 16. His story is told in 2 Chronicles 26. Uzziah was one of the most energetic and most successful kings of the Southern Kingdom. If he would have been a US president he would have campaigned not just for 1,000 points of light but 10,000 (see President George ...

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 ...