The Simpleton Blog

Today I want to start with the story of Angus McGillivray. It’s a phenomenal true story, that comes from a soldier’s account of life in a World War II Japanese prison camp. The book is called Through The Valley Of the Kwai, and the soldier who wrote it was Ernest Gordon. You see, Angus was a Scottish prisoner in one of the prison camps that was filled with Americans, Australians and Britons who had all helped build the famous Bridge of the River Kwai. But the massive prisoner

Pastor’s Bookshelf - Welcome to my bookshelf!  Each month I will discuss a recent book that I’ve finished.   This month I’d like to talk about  Living Life Backwards By David Gibson This book was recommended to me recently by another pastor. They sort of off handedly referred to it, and I thought the point they were making was brilliant - so I rushed out to the library (okay, the app on my phone) and downloaded the audio book immediately - I was not disappointed. This book ta

You know, when I was a kid - some of you already know this - I grew as a pastor’s kid, and our whole life revolved around the church. And I want to be clear - I loved the church. I know some people have had really rough experiences with the church, but every church I have been a part of has been a wonderful family of God. The little old ladies who ran Sunday school - they were like extra grandmas. The youth leaders were like aunts and uncles to us - my church friends were pra

Why do we build sand castles when we go to the beach? Why do we build snowmen that we know won’t last? For that matter - why do we do laundry in a never ending cycle and why do I bother cleaning my house while my children still live in it? These are the real questions that keep me up at night. I fell down a rabbit hole on the internet last week because I knew that sand castle, and sand sculpture competitions exist and I got curious - what do they do at the end? When my kids m

Have you ever read a story in the bible and thought - wait a minute, I’ve seen a TV show just like this? Well - maybe that’s just for bible nerds - but back in 2010 CBS aired a brand new show that ended up being WILDLY popular and it sounded an awful lot like the scripture we’re going to get into today. When it came out this show was the most popular new show in any genre that year - it premiered to 38.6 million viewers and to this day that premiere is the highest rated and m

Pastor’s Bookshelf - Welcome to my bookshelf!  Each month I will discuss a recent book that I’ve finished.   This month I’d like to talk about  Finding God’s Life For My Will By Mike Donehey Mike Donehey is probably best known as the lead singer for a Christian music group called Tenth Avenue North. I had heard of them, but didn’t know their music very well (I think my wife had listened to them more than I did), but then years ago we went and saw them on the free night at Uni

When I was a kid, there was this adorable disney pixar movie that came out called Monster Inc. - it was such a fun, novel idea. We enter the world of monsters who are all a little bit cute, and they have this elaborate system of creating doors into kid’s bedrooms to scare them, because screams are electricity for monsters. And when I was little, in the movie a kid gets loose in the monster world and causes all kinds of havoc. Fast forward ten years - I am a grown adult, marri

How do you define what is good?  How do you know when something is right or wrong? By what standard do you draw the boundaries of morality in your life? [And for some of you here today - by the end of this I may have an invitation for you to an entirely new standard] . I started reading this book recently called Dominion: how the Christian revolution remade the world, written by an atheist/agonistic historian named Tom Holland. Well - he was an atheist when he started. In fac

Eugene Peterson is probably most famous for his work on the translation of the bible called “The Message.” But, I have discovered in recent years - he was SO much more than that. His knowledge of the original languages is incredible, but his knowledge of the bible - both the words on the page, but also the meaning behind those words -  is even more inspiring. He has an intimacy with the way he walks through the pages of scripture that left me with my jaw on the floor more tha

Now I know that it’s January - it’s a new year, and so I’m sure that none of you are wasting your life watching stupid videos on the internet. You’re better than that, I can feel it - you’re people with purpose, people with drive. But not this guy - I love those dumb videos. That algorithm has got me pegged - they know exactly what I want to watch. You can ask the staff, or my poor wife - the amount of times I whip out my phone like, “hang on, I have a cool video I want to sh

You know, we’re getting to a sort of weird place as Pastor and people - where I’ve been here for a couple of years now, and I.. I can’t quite remember which stories I have already told you all. So if you’ve already heard this one - bear with me. Back in 2013, I was just finishing up seminary. Sara was completing her masters degree at Wheaton College in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. And we were both about the graduate. And for a while there we had talked abo

You better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout, I’m telling you why. Santa Claus is coming to town. Little did you know, that beyond being just an adorable children’s Christmas song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” is an extremely accurate, wildly creepy metaphor for God’s impending judgment. He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake. If you want more detail, go read Psalm 139

[read the tale of three trees] You know what I love about that book? It’s so clever - when we start out, we have pieces to a puzzle, but we can’t quite see the picture. We don’t know how all the pieces come together to make a complete and beautiful picture. I’d never heard that story before I got married, but my wife Sara knew it from her childhood - and we’ve read it to all of our children. I can’t figure out if it’s a Christmas book or an Easter book - I think it works for

This morning I wanted to take a second to admire this nativity set. I’m sure many of you had these in your homes or in your churches growing up - but if you’re not familiar, a nativity set is a little frozen moment in time with little figures for each of the characters in the Christmas story. I like this one because it’s for little kids. When I was growing up we had a very delicate wooden set that my dad got when he went to Israel - very precious, and probably very expensive.

I love a good proposal story. Guy’s all nervous, girl’s all excited. Surprise, ring, happiness, etc, etc. So I wanted to start this morning by telling you my proposal story - how I asked my incredible girlfriend to become my wife. Now at the time, I was living in Chicago - I’d already started my first semester of seminary down there. And Sara was still living up in Grand Rapids - we were doing the whole long distance relationship thing - which was rough. And we’d talked about

What is the difference between wrestling someone and fighting them? One of my absolute favorite things to do as a father is to wrestle with my boys. And I’ll tell you - my daughter Maggie is the baby, but she throws herself in there with reckless abandon. It’s really the closest you can get to your kids, physically - right? Just wrestling with my little guys. Anybody here wrestle with their kids? I don’t even have to do anything to initiate it - I can be on the other side of

I wanted to start this morning out with a question - it sounds easy, but I think it’s a trickier question than you might expect. I want to ask, “How much does your integrity cost?” There’s an old story about Theodore Roosevelt before he was president, he spent some time as a rancher. And one of his cowboys lassoed a maverick steer, and was getting ready to brand the steer. Now the part of the range that they were on was claimed by Roosevelt’s neighbor Gregor Lang. According t

I grew up in a home with two working parents. My mother, who ironically is named Ruth, she started her own business before I was born. She was a dentist for a lot of years - running her own practice in a suburb of Detroit called Grosse Pointe, which is where she met my dad. And both of my parents are absolute workaholics - I definitely get it from somewhere. And in our house, work was how you oriented life. You achieved and that’s what gave you value - you set goals, go after

So this past week, I threw up a prompt on an app called “Threads” - which is basically just Facebook’s version of Twitter. And here’s what I said, [put screenshot on the screen]  “hey help me out - what’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever had with your kids?” And I love doing stuff like that because the comments never disappoint. There was one where a lady was driving with her child in the back seat and they drove past a police car pulled over next to a traffic accide

Have you ever been surprised by an emotion? Like someone in your life will do something - and it’s not that big of a deal, but you have a really strong reaction? And you’re just sort of like - woah, where did that come from? Like maybe it’s a family member or a co-worker, and they’re always doing stupid stuff (anybody else have family members who are professionals at doing stupid stuff?) - and they’re always doing that nonsense, but for some reason this time it just sets you