When Hurricane Katrina hit in September of 2005 it not only did a tremendous amount of damage to the Gulf Coast, but it also brought very real human needs to our television every night, needs that weren’t a continent away affecting people with a vastly different culture, but folks we could relate to. Before that, […]

As the news broke in Japan it wasn’t too long before I got thinking about UMCOR and its role in the relief effort of many of these disasters.  We are blessed to have Japan as the center of much of our United Methodist missionary work in Asia so we had “people on the ground” who […]

When my daughter was younger we bought her a traffic jam game.  It was a puzzle that had a red car that you needed to get out of a parking lot by moving other cars forward and back so the red car could get to the exit.  (I know that was the worst description in […]

When I was growing up you didn’t get braces until your teeth had all come in.  But today the approach is to do braces much younger, often at age 8 or so.  That way they come in straight rather than trying to correct them later.  Many churches equate stewardship with dentistry (getting our members to […]