Yesterday, I began a series of posts challenging grandparents, who are able, to take their kids’ kids for a while. Reason number one? It allows for marriage renewal for your grand-kid’s parents. Second, taking your kids’ kids allows for deep layers of love. Let me explain. I have a daughter we adopted when she was four. [Side note: one year – during “Cousin’s Camp” – Katie and I went to Ethiopia to bring her home.] We don’t know much at all about the first four years of her life. We imagine they weren’t fun. At the very least, we know...

Last Sunday morning, a very bizarre thing happened. Like, weird. Super weird. When things like this happen, it reminds me why I don’t gamble: I am awful at predicting the future. I would never have predicted this. Before 6 am, two teenage boys were out of bed and beyond excited to go spend a week with younger children and grandparents. I need you to go back and read that sentence one more time. And I don’t mean that they were up and excited because we were leaving then to go to their grandparent’s house. We weren’t leaving until after church,...

I wonder if I have misunderstood Deuteronomy 6? I wonder if, for the past fifteen years or so, I have missed a key point in Moses’ plea for family devotions? I wonder if my assumption that it was all up to me to have a plan and be intentional and “pastor” my children set me up for defeat and failure over and over and over again? Maybe it is because I am a pastor. Maybe it is because my children can smell their dad’s “pastor-mode” from a mile away. Maybe it is because my kids are super weird. Maybe it...

Recently my middle child (Seth) randomly approached me and said, “Dad, I have some ideas for our student ministry I want to share with you.” I say “random” because this sort of thing doesn’t usually come out of his mouth. Honestly, this sort of thing doesn’t come out of any of my children’s mouths. It is rare when we talk about church stuff. They know what I do. When I began to probe about their thoughts of this or that, they can smell a mile away that I am going into pastor mode. So I was beyond intrigued when Seth...

Yesterday morning at The Church at West Franklin, I began a new sermon series called “God is the Question.” In complete transparency (I hope!) I shared (in the sermon and on today’s West Franklin Talks Podcast) that I borrowed the title from a really good book by Martin Copenhaver, called Jesus is the Question. If you are looking for a good summer read, especially a good devotional summer read, I commend it to you. A few other books that deal with the questions Jesus asked are Holy Curiosity: Encountering Jesus’ Provocative Questions by Winn Collier and The Questions of Jesus...