A reflection on John 16 from our Sunday sermon

When Mom Knows Best

Growing up in the 1980s as an only child meant finding creative ways to entertain myself. No internet, no YouTube—just imagination and whatever I could find in the backyard. I vividly remember being about five years old, playing with a particularly good stick I’d found under my grandma’s tree. As I threw it higher and higher into the air, my mom came outside with a warning: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

I assured her it was fine.

“Well,” she said, “when you hit yourself in the eye with that stick, don’t come crying to me.”

You can guess what happened next. That stick came down and hit me directly in the eye. As I held my throbbing eye, trying to stay quiet so she wouldn’t know she’d been right, I wondered: Does my mom know the future?

She didn’t, of course. She just had parental intuition. But as Christians, we have something far greater—we can listen to our God who actually does know the future and can tell us things to come. Continue reading →

Reflections from Week Two of Our Evangelism Class

“Who does that sound like to you?” my friend Blaine asked after reading a passage from Scripture. My Buddhist friend paused, then quietly said, “Uh… Jesus.” Blaine smiled. “You know what? I think you’re right. That sounds like Jesus to me too. Does it mean anything to you that this was written 700 years before Jesus was born?”

I watched the color drain from my friend’s face. For the first time in our many conversations about faith, he had no wise-crack response, no smarmy comeback. He just sat there, speechless.

That moment, years ago, taught me something powerful about the difference between sharing my personal experience with Jesus and sharing God’s own testimony about His Son. Both have their place, but one carries a weight and authority that the other simply cannot match. Continue reading →