My cousin has decided to become a cop. She’s 39 years old, and the cutoff to enter the academy is 40. She smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish before she decided to make this startling career shift. Now she runs three miles a day, lifts weights twice a week, and lives a Puritan existence.
When I was a kid my brother Pat and I used to get in arguments with the neighbor kids. We went to Catholic school and they went to public school, and often the rhetoric devolved into snide comments about Catholics vs. “publics.”
“All you need is love,” one of the most celebrated pop singles ever—written by the Beatles in 1967—said little more than: “All you need is love. Love. Love is all you need. Love. Love. Love.” Think about all of the songs and poems written throughout the history of our human family.
This morning our 4-year-old came into our room, upset because a Lego tower he had built had broken. “It's OK,” my wife said to him, “you can fix it. You can rebuild it.” “No!” he cried, “It was hard work.” It was hard work.
Today we have a lesson in produce. A number of years ago, researchers found that in order to get people to eat more grapes, they had to do something about the seeds.
If you’ve ever been given the task of pruning branches on a vine, you know that it is no easy feat. It is often impossible to tell where the vine ends and the branches begin because they are so intertwined and interconnected.
Certain memories remain vivid as years go by. One that stands out clearly in my mind is a memory of my wife sitting in a gold chair in the living room of our first house. It was the middle of the night and she was nursing our newborn daughter.
“This is not my father’s paper. This is not my husband’s paper. This is my paper.”
It has been said that a mechanic is only as good as his tools. It’s a good bet that the same can be said about a shepherd. However, not too many in our congregation, unless you are reading this in New Zealand, can list “shepherd” under occupation on a census form.
In our daily work each of us is a shepherd. We are in charge of the quality and quantity of work that we do. No one can make us be less than we are.