By Cindy Koch –
Well, that’s right. I’ve taken a long, lingering look over the last twenty years of marriage, and I’m actually going to go through with it. It’s been a long time coming, and I really can’t believe I’m brave enough to be doing this. This last month together, it has been an intense scramble of plans for this all to work out. But in one week—kids, minivan, dog, nice little neighborhood, cell phone, my favorite coffee cup—all of it will be left behind. I’m leaving.
By Joel A. Hess –
We need more Josephs!
You don’t hear much about Joseph. He just disappears after the birth of our Lord. He reappears for a moment when Jesus scares his parents by staying in His real Father’s house, but then he is gone again. We call him Saint Joseph, but what did he really do?
By Paul Koch –
I have noticed over the years that the people who seem to care the least about a day set aside to acknowledge fatherhood are, in fact, fathers. The men who are honored on this day don’t tend to think all that much about it. When someone asks a father what he is going to do on Father’s Day, he usually hasn’t given it much thought and probably doesn’t really expect anything in particular. Sure, your family may have a certain tradition that is carried out every year but that is not usually some great expectation that a father desires for himself but is something that has worn in by time and habit. Father’s Day is a difficult day of sorts. It is one that we are expected to observe yet no one is really sure what we are supposed to do with it. It is a day that is all about fathers but turns out to be as complicated as the men it honors.
By Tim Winterstein –
Since high school, I’ve been interested in my family’s genealogy. Nearly all of us German Lutherans as far back as I can trace, all of those generations are part of who I am. So far, there haven’t been any shocking discoveries, but there are certainly intriguing gaps in the records. At what point did my German ancestors settle in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (my father’s side) or Russia (my mother’s side)? What is the connection between the German town of Winterstein and my family? (One interesting speculation is that our ancestors were Sinti [Christian Roma or Gypsies] who took the Winterstein name after working as tailors for the minor nobility of Winterstein).
By Tim Winterstein –
What would happen if an entire country took independence and individualism to their logical and extreme ends? We don’t have to wonder. We have Sweden. For the last 40+ years, Sweden has been engaged in a social experiment which now has borne its desiccated fruit. The Swedish Theory of Love is the documentary telling that story. (You can find it online here. If you don’t want to subscribe, you can simply share the movie—I shared it to be visible only to me on Facebook—and you can watch it for free.)
By Cindy Koch–
For some of us, the day came and went. Flowers, family, breakfast, phone calls, homemade cards, maybe even a glass of champagne if you were lucky. Mothers all over the country were honored in some little way due to a brilliant campaign on behalf of Hallmark. It was a lovely little day set aside to give thanks for the mother in our lives.
By Paul Koch –
Now today is a great day. It’s Mother’s Day! And if there was ever a cause worthy to observe, I think that motherhood is a great one. Now, truth be told, sermons on Mother’s Day can be a bit dicey. See, while we all may want to honor our mothers on Mother’s Day, it sometimes goes awry in practice. So, on Mother’s Day you will have those who will be consumed with guilt for how they have treated or mistreated their own mothers, and a sermon highlighting how mothers ought to be honored will only drive them further into despair. Then there are the mothers who will hear the glowing praise of motherhood in a sermon only to receive it as some impossible standard that they have not kept.
By Paul Koch –
How do you describe the church? If someone were to ask you what church is or what does it mean to be part of a church, or what makes a church a church, how would you answer? There are, to be sure, a vast number of possibilities of how one might give a definition to the church. They might speak about a human organization with rules and traditions that govern direction and purpose. You might describe it as a spiritual thing, a gathering of the people of God, called by His Word. While the church exists in the world it is not necessarily of the world, that sort of thing. Then again,
By Tim Winterstein –
I’m on my way back from the Newport Beach Film Festival. Of the films I saw, one of the recurring themes was youth and growing up in this cultural moment. Two documentaries in particular addressed this theme from different angles. The first was Minding the Gap, about three friends whose youth is documented by a fourth friend. Bing Liu is clearly a talented filmmaker from very early on, as he films his friends skateboarding around Rockford, Illinois.
By Paul Koch –
Sometimes it seems as if I’m living in some sort bizarre parallel universe, where the things I learned from my childhood, the things that have helped defined me up to this point no longer seem to matter. Or perhaps a better image would be that of a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. I often find myself wandering through my world, confused by what I see and unsure of how we got here. Perhaps I was asleep while everything was changing, or I didn’t keep up with times. Perhaps I didn’t really care. And now I’m at a loss to explain just what the hell is going on.
By Tim Winterstein –
Some things are too horrific to face straight on. You have to shield your eyes, take a side glance, observe from an oblique angle. One of the feature-length documentaries screening at this year’s Newport Beach Film Festival is Forever ‘B’ (now called Abducted in Plain Sight), and its story is almost beyond belief.
By Tim Winterstein –
[SPOILERS]
First of all, if you haven’t gotten Movie Pass yet, what are you waiting for? If you sign up on the website, it’s only $6.95 a month, and if you see even one movie a month, it pays for itself. (Just make sure that it covers theaters in your area. It didn’t cover Wenatchee for a long time.)
By Paul Koch –
Ruby is our insanely energetic brindle boxer. Though she is not a puppy anymore, she hasn’t slowed down all that much from those first days after we brought her home. These days, she is as much a part of our family as any of our five children and has learned her place among the pack. She loves her massive collection of tennis balls and going for walks around the block or hikes in the foothills. She loves sitting in that sunny spot on the floor in the morning, and she loves to clean up under the table after a meal. But more than anything else, she loves this family. She loves her adoptive pack more than anything else in her world. In fact, our family is her world.
By Cindy Koch –
Today I am sick with anger. Every moment that my own beautiful little children inch toward that front door, out into the bleak and dangerous world, I become frantic. There are murderers and swindlers out there, just outside a parent’s protection. They lay in wait, hunting our children, just beyond our doorstep. I am furious that these evil attackers can destroy such precious lives—moments, years, smiles, hopes, and dreams—for no reason at all. I am devastated that over and over a mother screams for her baby that will never come home, a father is defeated by an enemy that never looked him in the eyes.
By Tim Winterstein –
I’d been waiting to see The Florida Project because of all the positive press it was getting. I purposely don’t like to read synopses, however, because I’d rather have no expectations and let a given film do what it’s going to do, and then take it on its own merits instead of being influenced by what a critic has to say.
By Cindy Koch –
Veteran parents confirm one of the greatest fears I have as a mother. To be sure, there are many fears that come along with the care of our own little ones. Mostly immediate, are they healthy and polite? Are they on track to graduate and behaving when you are not around? Will they be successful and prosperous? We put in decades of work, money, and sacrifice so that our children will grow up well, whatever that means. But there is a pit in the depth of my heart that the most important thing will turn out badly. And the tears of the mothers and fathers walking this path—sometimes years ahead of me—trickle back to my steps today.
By Cindy Koch –
Our children are hungry. Wide-eyed, they look up to you for a meal of daily bread. When it’s cold, they shiver and pull you close. When it’s dark, they search for your strong arm to comfort them. When they are given that Word of Life spoken to them, declaring them to be a righteous child of the Most-High God, they look to you to feed them more.
By Paul Koch –
When the power went out around 10:00 on Monday evening, my wife and I decided to go ahead and just call it a day. The kids were all tucked in bed, or at least were in their appropriate rooms, and we went through the usual bedtime routine by flashlight. As my wife went to draw the shade, she couldn’t help but see the red glow that filled the night sky. We went outside and tried to guess how far away the fire was. It was close, that’s for sure, and it was fast. Within an hour, the blaze took up the whole skyline as I looked toward the hills from our front porch. My wife was afraid, and I didn’t know how to reassure her. Shoot, I was afraid and tried to think through our next steps. One thing was for sure: This fire was going to change this great city of ours, and all I could do was watch. Well, I could protect my family, but I couldn’t alter the course of that fire.
By Tim Winterstein –
[SPOILERS!]
Movies and shows made for children always seem to include sub-themes that resonate with adults. Maybe it’s just marketing so that parents will take their children to the theater (only $7,800 for a family of six!), but I can remember it in television shows as well. Animaniacs was my generation’s Phineas and Ferb. Both have adult jokes running throughout that barely registered with the children who primarily watched those shows. More recently, Disney and Pixar have made sophisticated animated films that appeal to both children and adults. Of course, “children’s” authors have probably always included subtexts that only become clear as one ages (see the Grimms, Roald Dahl, or The Chronicles of Narnia). That’s part of the joy of having certain books read to you as a child and then re-reading them for yourself at older ages.
By Paul Koch –
Gathering in our Lord’s house on Thanksgiving Day is an easy thing to do. It is, after all, a national Day of Thanksgiving. And so, if you are to give thanks this is the place to do it. This is a place where you worship our Lord, a place where he gives to you his great gifts over and over again. If we are to take a day to stop working and shopping and running here and there to say, “Thank you” it is good to begin such a day here. In fact, I think it is a wonderful tradition that our country observes such a day as this. In the midst of all the political pandering and fearmongering and finger pointing, it is worth our time to stop and marvel at the blessings that we have in our lives.
