At church this morning, I learned that three of our congregants died from Covid-19 in the past week, one of whom was a missionary in Columbia. The disease is ravaging the Charlotte metro-area where I live as well as much of the American South. Vaccination rates here are significantly lower than other parts of the country and given that the Delta variant is as contagious as the chicken-pox, I’m not surprised that our hospitals and ICUs have filled to the breaking point.

Earlier today, my friends and colleagues at Gordon-Conwell hosted a retirement luncheon in my honor. It is hard to believe that this was the culmination of 15 years as editor of the Advent Christian Witness followed by 24 years as the Library Director at Gordon-Conwell. Below, I want to share my own reflections which I shared with those assembled at the close of the event. I share them in gratefulness to the Triune God for his providence and care for me over these past many years. I’m not done yet. There is more to do. But this represents the transition to the next stage in my journey of faith. Many of you have shared this with me and I am grateful to you.

“Eugene Peterson believed translation is a kind of ‘lectio divina–more than only getting the words right, there is spirit, the vibrancy of the text, the livingness of the message.’ The Bible was not a dead book. It was vibrantly alive” (218). What Peterson was trying to do was paraphrase the biblical text into idioms common to the folks who worshipped at the congregation he served in the Baltimore suburbs and even more to working-class folks like his father, a butcher, and the people he grew up around in Kalispell, Montana.