My daughter had a difficult time with transitions in her teens. Chalk it up to Down syndrome, obsessive-compulsiveness, or just being a teenager.

The kid was 10, old enough to enter the part of the pool where the diving boards were. A few of the big kids stood around taunting the smaller kids who refused to climb the high platform

More than anything else, Jesus has one basic message: The kingdom of God is at hand.

Perhaps you entertain grand dreams of how to live out your Christian vocation. Perhaps foreign missions where you can “gather the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” or cloisters in the desert, appeal to the romantic side of your nature.

Last year I suffered one of the worst burdens of my life: I developed COVID-related vertigo. As soon as I got sick with cold and flu-like symptoms, but before I tested positive, my ears also started to hurt.

My friend Shannon did her first Ironman triathlon a few years back. She’d been doing triathlons for more than a decade, but this was the first one anywhere near that long. It’s a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike, and then a 26.2-mile run.

I started high school in the '60s just as the boom in folk music began. I was overwhelmed when, underage, I sneaked into the Quiet Night in Old Town Chicago and first heard Peter, Paul and Mary live. For the next half century, I bought their albums, watched them on television and saw them in concerts everywhere from McCormick Place in Chicago to the Boston Commons.

"God's going to punish you!" the angry older sister said. Her little brother had been misbehaving since they'd arrived at the playground.

Back when I was a student in the seminary, we would be tested in general areas of theology as well as in the specific course work we were taking. They would give us an extensive reading list for those "area" exams. One of them included the theology of the Holy Trinity.

When I think of Pentecost, I think of teaching my younger daughter to ride her bike. It was about this time of year many years ago that she was ready to try riding without training wheels.