Dear Praise Family, I’m sure many of you aren’t familiar with the name Edward Kimball. Edward Kimball was a Sunday School teacher at Mt. Vernon Congregational Church in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1800s. In 1854, a new student began to attend his class. At the time, that student wasn’t there of his own volition, but as a requirement given to him by his uncle, who took in the young man and gave him a job in his local shoe store. This young man’s uncle saw his propensity for mischief and figured that if he were required to be at church, it would help to keep his tendencies at bay. One day in 1 ..read more

This past week, I was excited to preach my sermon from Genesis 1:1-5. Seeing as it was the first Sunday in Epiphany, I was looking forward to using this Old Testament text to talk about the Epiphany, which I had never done before. I had a blast studying and working on this message for last Sunday….and then the service was canceled because of snow. How disappointing. As I’m settling into my office this week to prepare for this next Sunday, I can’t help but to get caught in the preacher’s trap of feeling like I need to work on something new lest I might be viewed as lazy. So, guilt weighs heavil ..read more

The beginning of this month marked the three-year anniversary of my time here at Praise. Before I took the call to serve as a lead pastor, my biggest fear was that somehow I would drive our church into the ground! I imagined myself being like a kid behind the controls of a large excavator…it would certainly be fun for the kid, but maybe not good for anyone else! But after these years, the fact of the matter is, God has been faithful! As I have been reflecting, though, I found myself thinking back to where God has brought us. In August of 2020, we were in the throes of COVID, wearing masks and ..read more

I think that we can all agree that promises are easy to make, but hard to keep.  No doubt there are times where we have broken promises that we’ve made, maybe not maliciously, but broken them nonetheless.  I’m sure there have been times where we’ve promised to do something for someone and ran out of time, or experienced a setback that kept us from fulfilling our promise, or maybe even just weren’t capable of carrying out what we promised, though we thought we would be.  Even the most well-intentioned people fail to keep promises from one time or another.  I know I’m guilty ..read more

Over the last 20 years or so, there have been 28 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that have gone into production starting with the Iron Man in 2008. This marvel universe is filled with characters like the Spider Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man who all have an “origin story” of how they became super heroes. Though this isn’t the case with all of them, many of the characters we know best have had some sort of event in their lives that has changed them and made them in to the characters that we know. For Spiderman, he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Captain America was ..read more

In the early 2000’s, there was a craze with TV shows that focused on survival. From shows like “Survivor,” to “Survivorman” (a man named Les Stroud who would be left in various locations in remote wilderness to survive for seven days), to “Man Vs. Wild” (which followed Bear Grylls who didn’t just try to survive, but to make it out from the wilderness to civilization), all of these shows glorified the idea of “survival” and what it takes to stay alive in the wilderness. And this fascination with survival continues today with shows like “Life Below Zero,” “Alone,” and even a show called “Naked a ..read more

“How much arsenic is too much arsenic in your diet?” I had a friend ask me this one time and it was some interesting food for thought (pun sort of intended). It may not be considered poison, but I often eat things that aren’t that good for me. I love a good piece of prime rib, marbled with fat, and I even eat the fat with it. I know that isn’t good. Or when my sweet tooth gets the best of me, I’ll buy myself a box of candy and notice that the serving size says something like “5 pieces” but I interpret it as “5 handfuls.” That much candy isn’t good for me. Or have you ever noticed that a 20-oun ..read more

I’m at the point in my life where I am realizing that my motivation for learning and doing new things is waning. Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like to try things or that I am unmotivated, but rather that I know that my time and energy in life is limited and it is currently taken up with my family, work, and hobbies that I already have. For example, I have wanted to learn to play guitar for quite some time and over the last two years I thought it would have been the perfect opportunity to try. But what I realized is that it takes a lot of time and energy to learn guitar, especially since ..read more

My kids are just around the ages where they like Beth and I to read the old Berenstain Bears books that came out when I was a kid. In each of the Berenstain Bears books, there is a usually some kind of problem, a solution, and a moral/life lesson that accompanies it. As we read these books to the kids, though, I’m often struck that the same lessons that were so prevalent in these books are still applicable today. One of these books is titled, “The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies,” and is about how Brother and Sister Bear were in the store with their parents and see all sorts of things that th ..read more

Have you ever wrestled with what it means to pray? Prayer is one of the greatest gifts that God has given us, but though it is a great gift, I get bogged down on so many minutiae that make it sometimes feel more like a curse! Should my eyes be open? Closed? Are my hands folded? What if they’re not? With my eyes closed, should I be picturing something? If so, what should I be picturing? If any of these are wrong, will God even hear me???? And all the while I grow distracted by all of these thoughts that, somehow, I can even feel more distracted and further away from God than when I started! And ..read more