Beloved:

           I’m home from an amazing week of listening to preachers preach and preaching teachers teach about preaching.  It was practically perfect in every way.  My two most favorite things about San Antonio, not in this order, were the food and the oodles of new airmen and airwomen who graduated from Lackland Air Force Base on Friday.  They are all so young and beautiful, their families so proud of them.  The whole city celebrates them in a way that made me feel like their mama too.  

          I got to spend about thirty minutes with one of my favorite preacher-teachers ever, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar who has been with me in sermon study all my preaching years.  He’s in his eighties and more prophetic than ever.   I introduced myself to him in a hotel lobby and he invited me to sit down and visit.
          I also got lots of great friend time with my buddy/colleague from Montreal, Reverend Takouhi Demirdjian Petro.  We ate and ate and laughed and laughed.
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          On Friday my best friend in the whole wide world arrived from Bloomington and we palled around the Alamo and the Riverwalk and ate amazing Tex Mex one night.  The next night we went to the saddest BBQ restaurant in the entire state of Texas, left and ended up in the best churrascaria restaurant in the entire state of Texas.
         All of which is to say I am grateful for the worship, the sanctuary, the reset, re-connection and the refreshment the week away afforded me.  I am excited to be back and getting booted up for Vacation Bible School 2017!!

Beloved:
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       I was doing the math and, between child care, nursery school and college, I figure we’ve paid 22 years’ worth of tuition to Indiana University.  My son will graduate from IU this Saturday.  He studies theoretical math and Chinese.  His and his sisters’ formal education began at Hoosier Courts Nursery School - about three blocks from where he’ll graduate.  His preschool class was full of international kids, not a few of them Chinese.  His teacher, Miss Staci, asked me not to send him to kindergarten.  “Let me keep him.  I’ll have him more than ready.”  When we visited Mike Love’s first grade class at Rogers Elementary I had the good fortune to be bitten by the classroom tarantula.  The bite required a trip to the Emergency Room but also left Principal Plummer feeling obligated to let me choose his classroom.  Mr. Love got Ben in ways few teachers did.