Imagine two children sitting in a wagon. The girl is in the front. She picks up toys and other items of interest to her as they are pulled down the sidewalk. She gives them to the boy in the back. He looks at them briefly and then tosses them aside. This is the picture offered…

There were chapel services every day of the week when school was in session at Concordia Theological Seminary. The Springfield, Illinois campus did not have a fancy chapel, but we did have a large room dedicated to worship. It included a large pipe organ and held as many as 150 people. It would be pleasantly…

The sweat was beading up on his upper lip as we stood outside in the heat. It had started innocently enough. I had walked one and a half blocks from our new apartment to the seminary campus. It was all new to me. I had never been away at school before; I had attended college…

She had gone through a very difficult divorce. Her two children were hurt by it as well. They were 8 and 12 – difficult ages to begin with – their pain and disappointment now greatly magnified by their father’s abandonment. The boy, especially, struggled in school and in social settings. Then one day she went…

She was frustrated. I could see it clearly. She rolled her eyes almost imperceptibly. But I saw the tell-tale sign of a ministry wife who was ready to go home after worship, as she looked past me at her ministry husband. He was in a deep and lengthy conversation with a man who needed some…

They were sitting my office with a counselor. I was watching him work, seeing how it’s done. He was a trained counselor and fellow pastor from a nearby town, and had agreed to meet with this particularly troubled couple if I would be there with them. So I watched him work. It’s amazing to see…

Is there no balm in Gilead?     Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people     not been restored? – Jeremiah 8:22 Jeremiah is lamenting here – admitting to the spiritual poverty of his own people. As one commentator put it, Jeremiah “saw the hurt of his people in exile, but…

A friend once described divorce as the gift that keeps on giving. She was dealing with her nearly-adult sons, challenged by their willfulness, and struggling with the ways in which their father was undercutting her parenting. She was happily married to a godly man who had committed himself to helping her raise her sons. Their…

They sat in my office distressed about the state of their marriage. “Here we are again. Same story. We got things back together 10 years ago. We thought we had it fixed. Then 7 years later same thing. Now, here we are again. Is there any hope for us. I just don’t know if I…

I couldn’t find my place as a real estate broker. I couldn’t make the grades as a pre-med student. I was put off by the idea of going to school to be some sort of junior executive. I was floundering. The interesting thing about all that is the solution was not something I engineered –…