If pastors only carry moral sayings in their pockets and go through the parish sticking them, like gummed labels, on the victims of the week, there will be no good pastor work; they must learn how to be gospel storytellers…  The storytelling pastor differs from the moralizing pastor in the same way that a responsible physicial differs from a clerk in a drugstore.  When and ill person goes to a physician, the physician “takes a history” before offering a diagnosis and writing a prescription.  THe presumption is that everything that a person has experienced is relevant to the illness and must be taken into account if there is going to be healing.  The clerk in the drugstore simply sells a patient medicine off the shelf- one thing for headaches, another for heartburn, another for indigestion- without regard for the particular details of a person’s pain. – Eugene Peterson

Things Worth Saying

I cannot ignore that I’ve been wrong before

But I must wonder if my blunders

Limit what I speak to being weak

It seems these days that we do not say

Much of anything, that can bring

Hope.

or Truth

or Light

This is our plight, failure to fight

To plead, to speak, to stand for what is right

Am I out of touch saying so much?

Is it wrong to believe, or dare to conceive…

That things are true.

To speak with confidence that there are things worth saying

To share truth with people that’s well worth weighing

Am I allowed the courage to preach that God is real

Speak to souls that He can heal

Give them truth that they can feel

Dare to risk that things are true

Bet my life on them and all I do

And stand to tell the world too.