I had the privilege of conducting the memorial service for my beloved father-in-law, Bill Matthews. Here is part of what I said.

What Moses had in his hand was a shepherd’s staff, which made sense as shepherding was his current vocation, but forgive me for stating the obvious, God didn’t ask Moses what he had in his hand because he couldn’t see it, or recognize it for what it was. God made every tree from which every staff had ever been hewn. He knew what Moses had in his hand, but He wanted Moses to stop and to look down at the little that He could bring which could pave the way for the miraculous power that God could bring.

Moses didn’t need all the things that he didn’t already possess in order to get started in fulfilling his purpose in God’s plans in the world. He just needed what he already had his hand, and God was going to do the rest.

Every Thursday I write a pastoral letter to my congregation, hoping that it helps us to pay attention to the reality of God together in the midst busy and distracting weeks.

This one is about family mantras, John’s first epistle, and our favorite Australian dog cartoon.

Memory in the Hebrew tradition isn’t simply a recall of an event. Rather, it is a revisitation, a reliving of what went before. It was part of the way that a largely oral tradition kept a record of a people with a unique origin story alive. Feasts and festivals and gatherings were ways to revisit memories, and to recall the goodness and faithfulness of God across generations. David asks the LORD to revisit his covenantal faithfulness and in so doing to act on his behalf as a recipient of that faithfulness.

You give your best to those who don’t care about you and you give your worst to those who do care about you deeply.

How much of our lives is spent giving the best of ourselves to people who don’t love us back, and who maybe aren’t even in our God-prescribed limited sphere of influence? Near strangers at work who we long to impress, people in casual social circles whose lives we covet deeply, people online who we don’t really know at all? And how much of our lives then ends up giving the people who love us the most, the very worst versions of ourselves?