About Me
I am first a person whose journey with God and others is the orienting center of my life. I seek to share openly of this halting, faltering discovery of the story of God in everyday living.
I can be contacted personally at earthlytents@comml.imap.cc
After 22 1/2 years as a pastor of a Philadelphia area church, and almost two years in New Zealand at Laidlaw College in Auckland, New Zealand, I am located in Dallas, Texas, as the International Director of ALARM (African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries). ALARM is an organization that seeks to restore communities that have been devastated by tribalism and warfare.
My wife, Naomi, is an amazing person with whom I share my journey. I am blessed with two special children whom I love and admire--Ben, a web designer living in San Francisco Rebekah, our daughter, a singer/actress in Texas.
My passions: reading, popcorn, writing, photography, walking, time with friends and family, thinking about the problem of evil and suffering, peace building and reconciliation, living out the gospel in a postmodern world.
I think one of the failures of today's world is that young people do not know that it's ok to fail at things, and to learn from them. There's been a tv programme on, I don't know if you've seen it, but the guy on it has developed this programme for parents to be real with their kids, and reteach them lessons that have been squeezed out of our PC world. One of the lessons were "You can't win at everything." A simple reality that has been ignored.
I did a questionnaire with my youth group a few years back, one of the questions was "how do you deal with failure?" Out of the 15 or so young people, one answered, "I've never failed at anything." I was surprised, either he never recognized where he has failed, or that he set himself such high standards he simply in his mind couldn't fail. When I read this I knew that I was going to have to pick up a very broken young man when he failed for what he understood his first time. That fall happened around a year later, he simply did not know how to firstly own his failure, or work through it and learn from it.