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Imagine this: You wake up on New Year’s morning to a fresh start. The dirty dishes you left in the sink the night before are clean and put away. The fridge door is sparkling clean, the sticky fingerprints nowhere to be seen. Holiday pounds have melted from your toned and fit body, and the wide-screen TV you’ve been struggling to save for stands proudly in the living room. Tada! What a wonderful fantasy!

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Tis the season for holiday music. If you’re anything like me, it’s all you’ll listen to till at least mid-January (I am not very good at accepting the end of the holidays and the start of the holiday-less part of winter…). My favorites are the Charlie Brown Christmas album and every piece in the Nutcracker. This season, a classic and an old favorite caught my eye (ear?) and made me think about a few things in a new way: The Little Drummer Boy!

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I was diagnosed with, and treated for cancer over 10 years ago. After 8 years in remission, my cancer recurred 2 years ago. Following more surgery and 3 different regimens of chemotherapy, my cancer was unaffected. Now it’s time for more aggressive surgery. A friend asked me, “Why you? Why has God allowed this to happen to you?”

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Recently I had an outpatient procedure involving fast-acting anesthesia. As the anesthesiologist put the medicine in my IV line, she said it might burn a bit. Less than 5 seconds later, I remember a tingly sensation as though I were fading away like Homer Simpson disappearing into the shrubs, or Captain Kirk dissolving into millions of energy particles in the Enterprise transporter. When I awoke it seemed like only moments had passed.

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For the past few months, our church has been in a campus-wide teaching series tracing God’s one story from Genesis to Revelation. We have been discovering how God is weaving together His great plan of making all things right in Jesus. What an amazing time in our church body to share God’s plan from the youngest to the eldest.

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Warm apple pie with vanilla ice cream is my favorite.  For me, it is traditional and a little nostalgic.  When I was growing up in the youth group at my church, our apple pie fundraiser was an annual tradition.  Now, we weren’t selling pies from a local bakery; we were actually making 300+ homemade pies. 

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Autumn is the quintessential season of change. A chill is the air, backyard bonfires fill our noses with the smell of smoke and leaves turn beautiful shades of yellow, orange and red. Then they fall, creating dry, crunchy piles on the ground, leaving stark profiles of empty, barren trees. It’s a beautiful time, or perhaps a melancholy time for those of us reluctant to let go of summer.

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Have you ever had to write a bio for yourself? How do you give someone a sense of who you are without opening yourself up to being radically misjudged, all because the joke you agonized over putting in sentence #3 doesn’t actually land? I think writing a bio is the worst. Forget bios—what about social media? Could someone scroll through your Instagram or Facebook and really get an accurate sense of who you are?

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Fasting is a common theme in the Bible when it comes to prayer. Traditionally, fasting is to go without food, for a period of time, to show sacrifice and to rely only on God for sustenance. In the modern world I have seen people fast specific things, such as soda, coffee, social media, and tv shows–things they feel hold precedence in their lives. However, fasting was intended for so much more than that.

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There’s a sign painted under the overpass I drive under on my way home. It’s positioned at a bend in the road, so I drive straight towards it. It’s impossible to miss. There is no context or attribution, no artwork, pretty colors or interesting font. But this simple sentence challenges me every time I drive past.

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