Love’s Mystery
Jack Hardaway ] We take so much for granted. Food. The earth. Friendships. Family. Spouses. Parents. Children. Church. Freedom. Safety. Prosperity. Health. Democracy. Like so many other things, we take love for granted. And like so many other things we don’t fully understand or appreciate what we have, until we almost lose it, or it […]
Lifted
Jack Hardaway ] Changing directions goes against our inclinations. We gather momentum and turning aside is difficult. We collide. Collision repair is a busy industry. The repair shops have a significant backlog. Whole worlds collide, whole galaxies, the cosmos sparks with the echoes. There is that old science fiction movie from the early 1950’s, When […]
Caught up in Love
Jack Hardaway ] Most of us have joked about how painful, and difficult 2020 was. “What next?” was the refrain, followed by a comical litany of how things could get worse, like a comet colliding with earth. But, from the perspective of the Gospel, the Grace of God has flourished. It has been a year […]
What Connects Us
Jack Hardaway ] Ladders are curious things They look funny. They are awkward. We all have funny and sad stories involving incidents and accidents with ladders. Our electricians had to get a special ladder to reach the lights here in the nave. I have to laugh whenever I see them carry it into the building, […]
Holy
Jack Hardaway ] Mark chapter one. Crazy times. Kind of like now. The air is tense. The legitimacy of the government is in question. There is talk of insurrection and reprisals. The capital empties, the entire city, and they head out to the wilderness, the countryside empties out too, and they go way out to […]
The Dangerous Game
Jack Hardaway ] On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me…ten Lord’s a leaping… That is today, the tenth day, ten lords a leaping. Jeff Foxworthy did his own 12 days of Christmas song years ago with a “tin of Copenhagen” for the tenth day, a fun song. Christmas ends this […]
Well Said
Jack Hardaway ] Words. They hold the world together. Words build things. They make things happen. Words also destroy, words inflicted or misspoken or withheld. The Word that creates…everything. The Word that holds all things together, that connects everything, that relates everything to everything else. The hidden, silent, whispered Word that is always speaking this […]
The True Meaning?
Jack Hardaway ] I am a big fan of all the Christmas stuff that surrounds us. All the customs, all the tacky things, the cheap sentimental tripe and treacle, the cheesy and the shallow, the crowded masses of humanity shopping endlessly, the crass commercialism. Yep. I love all that stuff. I am constantly amazed at […]
Light People
Jack Hardaway ] Light. We can’t see it unless it shines on or through something or someone. Like stained glass. Or, like the Light People in Pelzer, wrapped and robed in Christmas lights, waving as people drive by in the dark, regardless of everything else, just bringing some light to a dark place. Light requires […]
John Appears
Jack Hardaway ] This just in- John the Baptist has been sighted again. He simply appeared, like he always does, out of nowhere. In that same way that Elijah suddenly went missing in the sky, John the Baptist just drops back in out of the blue. This time he was seen out at the Anderson […]
From the Fig Tree
Jack Hardaway ] We have this fig tree. I had to move and replant it a couple of times until it found a happy place. We just forgot about it for a few years. Now it’s trying to take over the back of the house. It went from having an occasional fig to having more […]
Finding Jesus
Jack Hardaway ] Where do we find Jesus? The Wise Men had it easy. They only had to travel a great distance, follow a star and avoid the evil clutches of King Herod. Now the disciples didn’t have to find Jesus, Jesus found them. Then Jesus found them again, leaving the tomb to search them […]
Waiting and Waiting
Jack Hardaway ] Waiting and waiting and waiting. What do we do while waiting? It can depend on just what we are waiting for. Waiting for an oil change is different than waiting for surgery. Waiting for a paycheck is different than waiting to give birth. Waiting for a court date is different than waiting […]
Up at Night
Jack Hardaway ] You ever have trouble sleeping? In the night, when we should be asleep, what is it that keeps us awake? What runs through our minds? What are the worries and preoccupations, all those details that make us burn the midnight oil? My grandmother used to pray for wisdom. After awhile she was […]
Like Trees Planted
Jack Hardaway “They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;” That is from Psalm 1, verse 3, it is about the righteous. They are like trees, thriving with the stuff of life, the sound of leaves and water, and wind, the scent of […]
All Love
Jack Hardaway ] The cross of Jesus is one the oldest images of sacrificial love. We have the traditional fourteen Stations of the Cross on the walls here in the nave of the church. The images show a little side story. Simon of Cyrene carries Jesus cross for a time, that station is number 5. […]
Imago
Jack Hardaway ) We live in an image-soaked time. Dripping, swirling, awash in images. We can’t see the water for the flood. Yet we live a faith where the image reveals God. We are over stuffed yet starving due to becoming resistant to the image, an acquired immunity due to over exposure, and we are […]
Crazy Weddings
Jack Hardaway Weddings are perilous occasions. At least in the parable we hear today. The kingdom of heaven is like a really dangerous wedding where at first no one shows up, people are killed and the city is burned down and then everyone shows up, invited in from off the street, and some are tied […]
Sharing the Miracle
Credit cards. They can be tricky. You know how those credit limits just keep going up. Ran mine way up, lost track of it. I ran it up to oh..about…5 or 6 billion dollars. Needless to say I couldn’t pay it, the credit collection agencies got kind of blood thirsty, then there was this big […]
Just Walk On In
Have you ever walked into the wrong house? I did that once (that I remember). It was at the beach. All the houses looked the same. I was having fun on the beach and walked back to the house. I just walked on in– to the wrong one. I was standing in a living room […]
Names and Stories
My first real camping trip out in the woods was just a sleeping bag, on a tarp, on the ground, under the trees. I woke up in the middle of the night, expecting darkness, but what I saw was a soft magical glow. An old fallen down decaying tree, right next to me on the […]
Oh Freedom
I once road a bus across the Rift Valley of East Africa. Though, I didn’t get to see much. The bus was literally packed three layers high with occupants. We road from Nairobi to Lake Victoria. By the time we arrived I was in pretty bad shape. It only took about six hours, but it […]
Dark Secrets
This is the story of a family. More specifically it is the story of a family with dark secrets that destroy it. Surprisingly it is also the story of bringing good out of bad. It is a story that shows us something about God and the way of God in a world full of dark […]
Rude Awakening
How sweet it is when a trickster gets tricked! When the sneak gets sneaked! When the player gets played. When the wily one gets wily-ed. Justice is sweet. These make the best stories. Jacob has the proverbial rude awakening. In a scene straight out of a National Lampoon movie, Jacob wakes up next to the […]