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Staff Trax

Faith in Action

This past Sunday, we read Matthew 16:13-20. Jesus had been traveling around teaching about the Kingdom of God and performing miraculous deeds, like feeding the 5,000 and healing people. The religious leadership were unsure of him and did not believe he was from God. In the midst of all this, he took a moment to ask his disciples who they thought he was. When he asked this question, Peter…

Sent to Love: To Discover God

When we left off last week, after some convincing, Jesus had offered healing for the daughter of a Canaanite woman. Through this woman’s persistence, Jesus came to realize that God had sent him to bring the Gospel to all people, not just the Jews. From there, Matthew tells us that Jesus went on to heal even more people, and out of compassion for those in need that Jesus fed over 4000 people…

Brilliant Light

A friend of mine wrote this, and with the eclipse this week, I find it quite relevant. “We’re kind of like the moon. When we put ourselves before God, all we do is get in the way of His light. We can never totally snuff it out, though. God is much too brilliant. Instead, it is a spectacular reminder of how dark we are without Him. Even when we’re in the worst place, His light still pierces…

Sent to Love: Speak & Act for Justice

I love Jesus and I love the promise of salvation he brings to this world. But, there are times that his words and actions greatly disappoint me and today’s lesson is one of these times. Reverend David Lose, the senior pastor at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, a congregation of over 14000 members, and the most recent president of Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia,…

What Are You Willing To Do?

Matthew 15: 10-28 (MSG)

10-11 He then called the crowd together and said, “Listen, and take this to heart. It’s not what you swallow that pollutes your life, but what you vomit up.” 12 Later his disciples came and told him, “Did you know how upset the Pharisees were when they heard what you said?” 13-14 Jesus shrugged it off. “Every tree that wasn’t planted…

​Why do you doubt?

I was always a really confident kid. I look back at pictures of my childhood and ask my mom why she dressed me that way and pulled my hair into a fountain on top of my head, but at the time it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I fell in love with music early on, and decided when I was in 3rd grade that I would study music in college and be a music teacher. I followed my dream,…

​Tell the Story

As I mentioned in my last letter, this year marks the 500th anniversary of the start of the Reformation. One of the major reforms that came out of this Reformation was the practice of reading Scripture in one’s own native language. Martin Luther believed that if God’s Word was going to be accessible to God’s people, then it needed to be translated into the people's native…