All Things New
When you’re flying at 30,000 feet, you look out the jetliner window and catch the general contours of the earth below. The details are lost to altitude, but you still get the lay of the land – a general sense of where you are. Even if the navigational aids are small, you nonetheless sense that…
Bitter Then Sweet
Perhaps it’s a human symptom of troubled times: Hearts and minds more and more wrapped in thoughts and feelings of nostalgia – sentimental and often-romanticized yearning for the past. When you’re nostalgic, the fond pleasure of precious memory mixes with twinges of sadness for times, places, or people that cannot be recovered. When the term…
Unsealing the Scroll
If you are-now or ever-were a little kid, do you ever get so excited about telling a story that your words tumble from your mouth like an endless string of run-on sentences? And every one of them begins with “and”?! “And I was walking home from school, and I saw this big fire truck, and…
He Drew the Line
If you asked me to rank my favorite Church holidays, last week’s Feast of Epiphany would be toward the top of my list. Part of my love for Epiphany is its excuse to keep the holiday lights burning just a little longer. The VanderVelden household has never been too quick to take down the Christmas…
A Rejoicing Heart
To celebrate my 40th birthday, Julie and I did what we always do to mark such occasions: enjoying a nice meal at a cozy supper club. With our little Mary (at the time our only child) left behind in the good care of a trusted babysitter, “me and the missus” were jazzed to be footloose…
A Christmas Heart
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during the Christmas Eve candlelight service at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. It is part of his Advent and Christmas series “Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room.” The children’s story, The Christmas Heart, is written by Pam McDonald and illustrated by Kim Hanzo. The book is…
A Pure Heart
The sights, sounds, and smells of the holidays lift our spirits and warm our hearts. But these holy days are frozen in melancholy for those who work the land: For the farmer whose acreage lies fallow under a blanket of snow and ice, for the backyard gardener whose little plot sits as dull and lifeless…
A Worshipful Heart
According to AAA, nearly 82 million Americans were expected to travel 50 or more miles over last weekend’s Thanksgiving holiday. And among that horde going over the river and through the woods, 6 million hardy souls got to grandmother’s house by airplane. And all those flyers yearned (or even prayed) for hassle-free journeys that satisfied…
A Forgiving Heart
At the time, it seemed like a good idea. I was a late-20s single man; I’d been promoted to managing editor of a small daily newspaper in northeast Wisconsin; I’d just purchased my first house. And I wanted to get a dog – a boyhood desire that my parents long refused. So, off to the…
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