Katie, my daughter Anna and myself are heading to St. Louis, MO.  My nephew Nathan is getting married to his longtime significant other Mindy, and they have asked me to do the wedding. 
 
My three brothers and all their families still live in the St. Louis Metro area, but I never get back home. I find it to be one of the great ironies of my life as a pastor. Here, I am surrounded by the closeness of families and talking about the importance of family, and yet personally my experience with my side of my family is very distant.
 
This week my brother David, who was the brother I was closest to growing up but whom I now talk to about once a year, has called me twice in two days to make sure I’m free on Friday afternoon and evening to “hang out.”  What is that…
 
After I talked with David, … I began to wonder how he is really doing and if we will get to that when we hang out or not. This set me to thinking… I’ll have a day to do whatever I want…  And so I’ve been making some plans to visit my hometown of Worden, Il.  I’ll visit the graves of my parents and brothers and grandparents, drive by the house I grew up in, and maybe sneak in a hello to my Aunt Jackie.
 
When you’re the distant member of a family you learn that …when you go back home… in one way or another, it’s a trip to reconnect with your roots…it’s about remembering you are a part of a family, no matter how distant you have become. 
 
Being a part of a family for me is about recognizing that there are some things about our lives that are so significant and yet remain so deep down in the trenches of our souls that sometimes it takes a physical connection to bring them to the surface.
 
I think being a member of a church family is a lot like that.  When people say, as they often do at Eden Prairie UMC, “this feels like home” we are recognizing what we might call our spiritual roots. And spiritual roots are important because whatever they are…they are a part of us… And isn’t the spiritual life really about being able to somehow reconnect with what is the deep down, very real part of ourselves… trusting that God will, embrace us and heal us and empower us all?
 
Keep the Faith,
Pastor Dan
 
 

Sometimes things happen that are just so precious, so moving, that you have to talk about them before you forget them.  Sometimes you keep talking about these moments because they are so moving, so important to you that each time you tell about them, you learn or experience something new and helpful.
 
As a pastor I’m very accustomed to both visiting people in the hospital and praying with all kinds of different people in many different moments of life.  The other day I was visiting someone from church in the hospital who has trouble hearing everything but loves to chat.  We both did our best and at the end of our visit I held her hand, bent down closer to her good ear, closed my eyes and began to pray.  I was coming to the conclusion of my prayer saying something like… “Gracious God, touch this one with…..”
 
In the middle of my sentence this lovely woman spoke over me and as quick as a cat pouncing, said, “In Jesus’ name, Amen.”  I’ve been around for a while and I knew this prayer was over, and so I immediately also said, “Amen.” I opened my eyes and she was looking right back at me with a smile and a gracious thank you for the prayer.….
 
I didn’t say anything to her.  Walking out to the elevator I was laughing to myself.  Waiting there, I had some time, and I began to wonder if she had heard a single word I had prayed.  (It was a pretty good prayer as I remember it.)  And then I thought you know, it really didn’t matter that she heard a word.  What mattered is that she felt my hand and that we closed our eyes together.  I think her saying “ In Jesus’ name, Amen,” prematurely was less about wanting the prayer to be over and more of a desire to let me know she was in that moment with me.
 
This morning I’ve been thinking about how is it that I am so predictable in my prayers that a lady who is hard of hearing and lying sick in a hospital bed can still guess when I’m about to say, “In Jesus’ name, Amen.”  This led me to think about why I say, “In Jesus’ name, Amen,” in the first place.
 
I don’t think there is anything enchanted about this phrase: As if God would not listen to our prayers unless we first clarified who it is or how it is we have come to pray to God in the first place. Neither do I think that we need to say it in order to prove ourselves to the one who is doing the listening part of the prayer.  At least for me, I end my prayers, “In Jesus’ name, Amen” because I need to recognize what happens to me when prayer is genuine, authentic… real. And what happens is that, well… Jesus shows up. 
 
I experience this often in these intimate settings where life and death seem to hang in the balance. When the veil between God’s kind of time and our moment of time is very thin.  When these moments occur and we utter this phrase, it is less a habit that we unconsciously tack on at the end of a few sentences and more an exclamation, almost of wonder.  In that sacred intention, in the holding of hands and the closing of eyes, or however it is that we create the space between people praying, Jesus does show up.  And although we cannot be as sure of the outcome of our petitions, we can trust the same presence we experienced together in whatever happens next.
 
Keep the Faith,
Pastor Dan