Press Enter / Return to begin your search.

Epiphany III

Storytelling . . .

In 2001, as I was working my way through doctoral courses in Religion, Psychology and Culture at Vanderbilt, I read pastoral theologian, Andy Lesterโ€™s book, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling. In that book he articulates several important ideas including the notion of โ€œfuture stories.โ€ The stories we tell ourselves about the future can have as much impact on us in the present as do all the stories we tell about our pasts.

For instance right now I’m carrying around a host of future stories about everything from what time Iโ€™ll turn out the lights tonight to what movie I might see this weekend, to where Iโ€™ll be teaching and what I will be researching 20 years from now. The power of future stories seems obvious when you try it on. But it is a significant challenge to the psychological traditions which mostly focus on the past as the main or only key to understanding personal identity or behavior in the present.

Read More

Christmas II

Pastors don’t pray much it seems. They are busy. But they are not filling their time with prayer, meditation or personal devotion. At least a study that came out this week says this is the case. Seems to me that more than families are likely hurting if pastoral leaders are spending so little time attending to their own spiritual lives. But lest I sound too judgmental, I remember well the struggle to care for my own spiritual well-being while also attending to the spiritual well-being of those I served in the years when I was full-time on a church staff. Even when I was doing what I knew to do to care for my own soul, it was not always the most effective or spiritually nourishing thing I could be doing.

Read More