30Dec, 2009

The Best Sermon I Ever Heard. Remembering David Gentiles.

Posted by Don
2

This evening hundreds of people gathered in a baseball field just outside Austin Texas to remember our friend David Gentiles. It was an honor to present the eulogy. Blue Like Jazz was dedicated to David Gentiles, because David is the reason I am a writer. He was a remarkable human being, and there will never be anybody else like him. For those who knew him, we were truly blessed. And for those who didn’t, may the stories we tell about him inspire you. ••• I heard somebody say every life is a sermon, that every new day we preach a point. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. It sounds like a lot of pressure to me. And the truth is I’ve been to a thousand or more church services and I can honestly remember the content of no more than three sermons. But if it’s true a person’s life is a sermon, David Gentiles preached the best sermon I’ve ever heard. I’ll never forget him, or what he did with his life. David was a rock of a man and his sermon was love. His life and what it pointed toward will remain with me, and no doubt with many [...]

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17Dec, 2009

Merry Christmas

Posted by Don
51

I hope you and yours are enjoying the coming of Christmas. It’s a sobering, peaceful Christmas around here. After a tough week following the search for two missing climbers on Mt. Hood, one of which attended Imago Dei here in Portland, the search was called off due to the improbability of their having survived a brutal week on the mountain. And then a dear friend in Texas was in an accident and is now on life support. I’ll be flying to Texas tomorrow where the reality that life is fragile will no doubt be made clear. I am grateful, though, that God chose to send hope to a people who, like sheep, had wandered off. I am grateful that Christ pointed us back to God, who is Love, and who taught my friend in the ICU how to love, and who is surrounded by the legacy of love that he created in God’s name. May the peace of Christ be with the families of Katie Nolan, Anthony Vietti and Luke Gullberg, and may the peace of Christ be with the friends and family of David Gentiles, who is like a father to so many of us. I’ll be back in [...]

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02Dec, 2009

Amazon Doesn’t Sell World Peace, so….

Posted by Don
0

Yesterday, Kristi Henson, a marketing executive at Thomas Nelson Publishers asked me to put together my Chrsitmas wishlist. Apparently, Amazon is running a feature in which they’ve asked authors to list some items sold on Amazon we might want for Christmas. I think it’s their take on the “celebrity playlists” you see on Itunes. Anyway, I sat for a while and thought about the spirit of Christmas and offered them a list. As a Christian leader, I took the assignment very seriously. I think it’s a lovely list and I thought I’d share it with you: 1. Some art for the neighborhood. I live in a quaint neighborhood just south of Portland. It’s a sleepy district known for its antique shops, restaurants and coffee shops. Everybody in my neighborhood walks, because we have two of the cities best parks, several grocery stores and boutique shops that bring pedestrians in from the city and suburbs. And there are untold numbers of sculptures, tastefully displayed around the parks and even in front of some of the retail establishments. I thought perhaps I could contribute to the aesthetic with one of these. I live in a condo so I’d probably have to put it [...]

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