When I Fall In Love
Stories
Contents
"When I Fall in Love…" by C. David McKirachan
"Rules of the Road" by C. David McKirachan
"You'd Have to Be Crazy to Live There" by Sandra Herrmann
"Marty's Flag" by John Sumwalt
Note: this installment was originally published in 2010.
* * * * * * * * *
When I fall in Love…
C. David McKirachan
1 Kings 19:1-4 (5-7) 8-15a
My son had fallen in love for the first time. It was frightening to watch. It reminded me of my own odysseys through the times and spaces where the small gods of passion and beauty and pride and anxiety and hope blended with hopelessness hold sway. Frustrated Greek heroes have nothing on passion saturated teenagers. I had learned from literature and pop music and movies about "true love." My assumptions matched my feelings. For me, love was a place of epic struggle. It pitted the greatest spiritual gift against all the limitations and broken promises that infest and define so much of what we know as life. So if I could breathe, if there weren't fireworks it couldn't be love.
While watching my boy, all of this came back. He fell, and he fell hard. She was gorgeous, intelligent, athletic, wealthy. She was also not real nice to him. After the prom she dumped him. It was not the end of the world. I knew he'd live through it, but it was hard to watch him suffer. We talked a lot.
I told him what he needed was a low-maintenance partner. He wanted to know what that meant. I told him such people take care of themselves, they take responsibility for their own issues, they aren't afraid to share joys or pain, they are grateful. They're people who are easy to be around. They're people who are good friends. I told him he needed to be that kind of a person, because to be any other kind of a person makes it harder to live well. I told him if he worked at being that kind of a person, he'd be more likely to find a person like that.
He asked me if I knew any people like that. Being who he was, he wanted to know if there were any female people like that. I thought about it and named a member of our church who had been a comfort, an adult he could trust who'd been a presence through his childhood. She was good at loving.
That conversation made me consider how I approached living and loving. I did something that it is not always easy to do. I listened to myself. Preachers who take the Word of God seriously have the incredible opportunity to teach and proclaim the very basis of life, and life abundant. We actually get to focus on teaching people how to claim the great joys of life and how to confront the pain we all experience. Sometimes it is so clear. Sometimes we know that what we're doing and saying is in harmony with the power we proclaim. And sometimes we loose that connection. Those moments of distance are the dark nights of our souls.
Our human needs and limitations are very important. We get tired, hungry, lonely, we grieve. It's those times, if we've listened to our own sermons; we remember our humanity and lean on those who are good at loving. We need low-maintenance people, people who listen. We need angels who feed us. We need angels who remind us we need rest. And we need to listen for the still, small voice of friendship and love.
My son lived through his heart break. He's growing into a low-maintenance man in his own right. I'm proud of him. Just after I got engaged, he came to me and told me he was proud of me for listening to my own advice. "What do you mean?" He reminded me of our conversation about a low-maintenance partner. "Do you remember who you told me was that kind of person?" I had to laugh. I'd recommended the person to whom I was now engaged. You give good advice dad. You ought to listen to you more often.
My wife might agree with that.
Rules of the Road
C. David McKirachan
Galatians 3:23-29
The Romans had as many different kinds of slaves as we have cars and trucks; and they put them to as many different uses. In this passage one of those specific models of slaves is used to speak about our new relationship with God. These were the ones that took care of kids, not only baby sat them, but taught them, mentored them. I always saw this as a judgment that spoke negatively about the Law. Having been a parent now for a few decades and grown beyond some of my own arrogance, I see it a bit differently.
Few, so few as to be on the endangered species list, children have a clue what it takes to raise them. I don't only mean the price tag, which is prodigious, but the anxiety, the attention, the altering of life priorities, the heart break, the putting aside of basic healthy self-care, the corking of anger, and the holding back of laughter to preserve the tad pole's fragile dignity. The list goes on and on. But the role of a parent is never ending. There are no reasonable limits. There are no places where a parent can say, I don't have to tolerate your childish behavior because I did it for the last 10 years and I earned a break. Sorry Mom/Dad, it's your kid, it's your problem. Their position in life is very similar to the make and model of slave in question.
I had very few glimmers of this as a child or a youth. I cruised along like the fool that I was, allowing my silly parents (according to me) to support me logistically, materially, emotionally, and spiritually until I began to grow up (that was sometime last year). The way they did that was to draw boundaries that I contested and carped about on a regular basis. But the boundaries allowed me the luxury of survival and health. They taught me how to get along with other idiots and sane people better than I could have without them.
When I began to understand the basis of these boundaries, the desire for my own well being that motivated them, the hope that underscored every limit they gave me, I was first stunned and then grateful.
My father used to call the Decalogue "God's green lights." He told me that red lights, signals that stop us, allow traffic to move freely and quickly. They allow drivers to know when it is a good idea to move ahead and when it's a good idea to leave the foot on the brake.
We all need boundaries. And we all need to grow to a place where those boundaries become part of a larger system of freedom and hope or the very boundaries that helped us to live better become prisons of negativity and judgment. In a system that is defined by freedom such limits become symptoms of wise and abundant life. It is the mentor's job to teach the child these limits while reminding them constantly of the potential and the power that the little twerps carry in their being, to teach them grace, forgiveness, and the power of redemption, and, most of all, to teach them that they will never be alone.
So I guess you might say, I've learned a lot about the rules of the road. And I am so glad that I had parents who loved me enough to keep at it, until I digested enough of their care to take some steps on my own. Now, I am an heir to their heritage. It's my turn.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
You'd Have to Be Crazy to Live There
Sandra Herrmann
Luke 8:26-39
There's a little house near me that is, in the neighborhood parlance, "an eyesore." The property is edged with trees and vines that go untrimmed year by year, and they have formed a sort of brambled screen around the yard. The yard itself is mowed, I assume because the city has stepped in more than once and told the resident that it has to be, or someone will do it for him at a charge of $50. The driveway is kept clear, so I think the guy who lives there drives. You really don't see much of him, whether he's at home or away, and I suspect that's the whole point of the brambles.
The house itself is quite amazing. In the midst of this neighborhood of conservatively dressed houses (white, tan, mustard, or robin's egg blue constitute the range of colors), this house is a bright, reddish purple. This makes neighbors say, "Thank God for the brushy screen muting that color!"
And that's not all -- the owner has added to the décor, bit by bit over the last 12 years. On the front of the house, there is a gigantic pink and white flower. Its pale green stem twists and winds to one side of the house. On the other street side, there is huge, multi-color butterfly. In a way, it looks like an old hippie's VW minibus.
Last year, the roof evidently leaked, because there is a new patchwork of shingles of unmatched colors on the front side of the roof. He put up Christmas lights this past year for the first time: old-fashioned, multi-colored lights that I remember from my childhood. It was then that he'd painted another flower, this one on the picture window.
People talk about this guy a lot, but no one I knows his name. A couple of people say he served in Vietnam. They add that this would explain a lot, and I guess it would. Not only was the war itself a horror, but then they came back home to a public that had, for the first time in history, watched that war daily, including atrocities on both sides, courtesy of the major networks. The result was that not only did we not have ticker-tape parades for returning soldiers, they were often vilified by a nation that had decided Vietnam was not worth the cost in lives and money and blamed the returning soldiers for the atrocities they had seen.
As a result, we talk a lot about PTSD today. After World War I, we had a lot of "shell shock." After World War II, there were guys who refused to talk about the war, and drank a lot, but we had no explanation or language for it. It took a "little" war in a little country to give us the concept of Post Traumatic Shock Disorder. Now we even apply that diagnosis to the folks who have yet to get their lives back on track after 9/11, major earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and human violence. We have come to understand that PTSD can even come from abusive home situations and other violence.
This fellow in the reading for today "had not worn clothes or lived in a house for a long time." He chose, for some reason, to live in the tombs.
The tombs in Israel are not marble stones in grassy settings. The custom in Jesus' day was to place dead bodies in the caves that are so common to the area. The flesh would dry out, the organs would rot away, and a year later, the family would come and scrape the bones clean and put them in a box with a simple notation of whose they were. Then, they would return the box to the cave.
So this man was living in caves filled with rotting corpses and old bones. The smell of death would be in his nostrils day and night. When it stormed, waters would fill the dry creek beds and rush around the cliffs where the burial caves were. The moisture would, of course, increase the smell of mold and rot. In the dry times, brushing against an old corpse would send a plume of dust into the air, and -- if you bent too close to the dust -- into your lungs, where fungal infections could take root.
What had made this man reduce himself to this level? Had someone he loved been imprisoned by the Romans? Even crucified? Had his lands been seized by some elder of the Jews who wanted more than he already had? Had his family died in front of his eyes? We don't know. We concentrate rather on the pigs running over the cliff, a "sure proof" that the man had become possessed by demons.
Well, no matter how we understand mental illness, it is absolutely true in a sense that this man was possessed of demons. Old memories he could not shake off, sadness that finally overcame him, anger that made him strong enough to break the chains others put on him in their fear: all of these possessed his mind and soul. We know that he was terrified of the power he saw in Jesus, because he "begged him repeatedly not to order [him] into the Abyss."
But Jesus spoke directly to those demons, recognizing what had driven the man mad, and at that, the sufferer willingly put on clothes, sat down with Jesus, and listened to what Jesus had to say. When others arrive on the scene, they see that the man is now "in his right mind" and their reaction is -- to beg Jesus to go away! Well, who knows what story this man has to tell that will be dangerous for those who played a part in his growing madness?
So Jesus goes away, as asked. But -- he leaves behind him a man who will return home and "tell how much God has done for him." And in doing so, may encourage others not to let the horrors we sometimes have to live through drive them mad.
Sandra Herrmann is a retired United Methodist pastor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Marty's Flag
John Sumwalt
Galatians 3:23-29
As many of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
-- Galatians 3:28
After worship on Memorial Day weekend Jo and I drove to Richland County over in the hills of south west Wisconsin to visit the cemeteries where many of our family and friends are buried. We always look for the small American Flags waving over the graves of several relatives who fought in our nation's wars: Jo's dad, Lester Perry, who served in the Philippines in World War II; my dad, Leonard, who served in North Africa and Italy; Jo's ggg Grandfather, David Sommars, a Civil War veteran, who lost his left arm in the march with Sherman in the Atlanta campaign; and my ggg Grandfather, Edward John Long, another Civil War veteran, who took two bullets in his spine at the battle of Lookout Mountain, November 24, 1863.
This year we made a special trip to Basswood Cemetery in the southern part of the county not far from the Wisconsin River. My best friend from high school, Martin Elliot, is buried there. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Marty called me a few years after he was discharged to tell me that he was gay. He hadn't sorted that out when we were in school. This was in the days before "don't ask, don't tell." The policy then was "don't be." I have always wondered what that must have been like for him and the thousands of men and women like him who served under those circumstances in all of our nations wars.
As we searched for his head stone, I remembered attending Marty's funeral near his home in Key West, Florida, in 1995. I sat in a packed church behind his father and step-mother, both active church members in a United Methodist church. I recalled that Marty had come to worship and later became a member of another United Methodist church at my invitation. I wondered if our neighbors and friends, who had welcomed him when we were teenagers, would have done the same had they known what he would have dared not have told them even if he had known himself.
Jo spotted Marty's stone high up on the hillside in the Elliot family plot. To my surprise there was no flag honoring his service. I had come to take a picture of Marty's flag. I looked around at the hundreds of flags that marked the graves of other service men and women and decided that maybe it would be all right to borrow one just for a few minutes. Marty would have thought this was silly. No doubt he was laughing at me from heaven. I didn't care. As I snapped the picture I thought to myself, "It is only right that he receive the same honor as every one who served." I owed him that much. We all do.
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
**************
StoryShare, June 20, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"When I Fall in Love…" by C. David McKirachan
"Rules of the Road" by C. David McKirachan
"You'd Have to Be Crazy to Live There" by Sandra Herrmann
"Marty's Flag" by John Sumwalt
Note: this installment was originally published in 2010.
* * * * * * * * *
When I fall in Love…
C. David McKirachan
1 Kings 19:1-4 (5-7) 8-15a
My son had fallen in love for the first time. It was frightening to watch. It reminded me of my own odysseys through the times and spaces where the small gods of passion and beauty and pride and anxiety and hope blended with hopelessness hold sway. Frustrated Greek heroes have nothing on passion saturated teenagers. I had learned from literature and pop music and movies about "true love." My assumptions matched my feelings. For me, love was a place of epic struggle. It pitted the greatest spiritual gift against all the limitations and broken promises that infest and define so much of what we know as life. So if I could breathe, if there weren't fireworks it couldn't be love.
While watching my boy, all of this came back. He fell, and he fell hard. She was gorgeous, intelligent, athletic, wealthy. She was also not real nice to him. After the prom she dumped him. It was not the end of the world. I knew he'd live through it, but it was hard to watch him suffer. We talked a lot.
I told him what he needed was a low-maintenance partner. He wanted to know what that meant. I told him such people take care of themselves, they take responsibility for their own issues, they aren't afraid to share joys or pain, they are grateful. They're people who are easy to be around. They're people who are good friends. I told him he needed to be that kind of a person, because to be any other kind of a person makes it harder to live well. I told him if he worked at being that kind of a person, he'd be more likely to find a person like that.
He asked me if I knew any people like that. Being who he was, he wanted to know if there were any female people like that. I thought about it and named a member of our church who had been a comfort, an adult he could trust who'd been a presence through his childhood. She was good at loving.
That conversation made me consider how I approached living and loving. I did something that it is not always easy to do. I listened to myself. Preachers who take the Word of God seriously have the incredible opportunity to teach and proclaim the very basis of life, and life abundant. We actually get to focus on teaching people how to claim the great joys of life and how to confront the pain we all experience. Sometimes it is so clear. Sometimes we know that what we're doing and saying is in harmony with the power we proclaim. And sometimes we loose that connection. Those moments of distance are the dark nights of our souls.
Our human needs and limitations are very important. We get tired, hungry, lonely, we grieve. It's those times, if we've listened to our own sermons; we remember our humanity and lean on those who are good at loving. We need low-maintenance people, people who listen. We need angels who feed us. We need angels who remind us we need rest. And we need to listen for the still, small voice of friendship and love.
My son lived through his heart break. He's growing into a low-maintenance man in his own right. I'm proud of him. Just after I got engaged, he came to me and told me he was proud of me for listening to my own advice. "What do you mean?" He reminded me of our conversation about a low-maintenance partner. "Do you remember who you told me was that kind of person?" I had to laugh. I'd recommended the person to whom I was now engaged. You give good advice dad. You ought to listen to you more often.
My wife might agree with that.
Rules of the Road
C. David McKirachan
Galatians 3:23-29
The Romans had as many different kinds of slaves as we have cars and trucks; and they put them to as many different uses. In this passage one of those specific models of slaves is used to speak about our new relationship with God. These were the ones that took care of kids, not only baby sat them, but taught them, mentored them. I always saw this as a judgment that spoke negatively about the Law. Having been a parent now for a few decades and grown beyond some of my own arrogance, I see it a bit differently.
Few, so few as to be on the endangered species list, children have a clue what it takes to raise them. I don't only mean the price tag, which is prodigious, but the anxiety, the attention, the altering of life priorities, the heart break, the putting aside of basic healthy self-care, the corking of anger, and the holding back of laughter to preserve the tad pole's fragile dignity. The list goes on and on. But the role of a parent is never ending. There are no reasonable limits. There are no places where a parent can say, I don't have to tolerate your childish behavior because I did it for the last 10 years and I earned a break. Sorry Mom/Dad, it's your kid, it's your problem. Their position in life is very similar to the make and model of slave in question.
I had very few glimmers of this as a child or a youth. I cruised along like the fool that I was, allowing my silly parents (according to me) to support me logistically, materially, emotionally, and spiritually until I began to grow up (that was sometime last year). The way they did that was to draw boundaries that I contested and carped about on a regular basis. But the boundaries allowed me the luxury of survival and health. They taught me how to get along with other idiots and sane people better than I could have without them.
When I began to understand the basis of these boundaries, the desire for my own well being that motivated them, the hope that underscored every limit they gave me, I was first stunned and then grateful.
My father used to call the Decalogue "God's green lights." He told me that red lights, signals that stop us, allow traffic to move freely and quickly. They allow drivers to know when it is a good idea to move ahead and when it's a good idea to leave the foot on the brake.
We all need boundaries. And we all need to grow to a place where those boundaries become part of a larger system of freedom and hope or the very boundaries that helped us to live better become prisons of negativity and judgment. In a system that is defined by freedom such limits become symptoms of wise and abundant life. It is the mentor's job to teach the child these limits while reminding them constantly of the potential and the power that the little twerps carry in their being, to teach them grace, forgiveness, and the power of redemption, and, most of all, to teach them that they will never be alone.
So I guess you might say, I've learned a lot about the rules of the road. And I am so glad that I had parents who loved me enough to keep at it, until I digested enough of their care to take some steps on my own. Now, I am an heir to their heritage. It's my turn.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
You'd Have to Be Crazy to Live There
Sandra Herrmann
Luke 8:26-39
There's a little house near me that is, in the neighborhood parlance, "an eyesore." The property is edged with trees and vines that go untrimmed year by year, and they have formed a sort of brambled screen around the yard. The yard itself is mowed, I assume because the city has stepped in more than once and told the resident that it has to be, or someone will do it for him at a charge of $50. The driveway is kept clear, so I think the guy who lives there drives. You really don't see much of him, whether he's at home or away, and I suspect that's the whole point of the brambles.
The house itself is quite amazing. In the midst of this neighborhood of conservatively dressed houses (white, tan, mustard, or robin's egg blue constitute the range of colors), this house is a bright, reddish purple. This makes neighbors say, "Thank God for the brushy screen muting that color!"
And that's not all -- the owner has added to the décor, bit by bit over the last 12 years. On the front of the house, there is a gigantic pink and white flower. Its pale green stem twists and winds to one side of the house. On the other street side, there is huge, multi-color butterfly. In a way, it looks like an old hippie's VW minibus.
Last year, the roof evidently leaked, because there is a new patchwork of shingles of unmatched colors on the front side of the roof. He put up Christmas lights this past year for the first time: old-fashioned, multi-colored lights that I remember from my childhood. It was then that he'd painted another flower, this one on the picture window.
People talk about this guy a lot, but no one I knows his name. A couple of people say he served in Vietnam. They add that this would explain a lot, and I guess it would. Not only was the war itself a horror, but then they came back home to a public that had, for the first time in history, watched that war daily, including atrocities on both sides, courtesy of the major networks. The result was that not only did we not have ticker-tape parades for returning soldiers, they were often vilified by a nation that had decided Vietnam was not worth the cost in lives and money and blamed the returning soldiers for the atrocities they had seen.
As a result, we talk a lot about PTSD today. After World War I, we had a lot of "shell shock." After World War II, there were guys who refused to talk about the war, and drank a lot, but we had no explanation or language for it. It took a "little" war in a little country to give us the concept of Post Traumatic Shock Disorder. Now we even apply that diagnosis to the folks who have yet to get their lives back on track after 9/11, major earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and human violence. We have come to understand that PTSD can even come from abusive home situations and other violence.
This fellow in the reading for today "had not worn clothes or lived in a house for a long time." He chose, for some reason, to live in the tombs.
The tombs in Israel are not marble stones in grassy settings. The custom in Jesus' day was to place dead bodies in the caves that are so common to the area. The flesh would dry out, the organs would rot away, and a year later, the family would come and scrape the bones clean and put them in a box with a simple notation of whose they were. Then, they would return the box to the cave.
So this man was living in caves filled with rotting corpses and old bones. The smell of death would be in his nostrils day and night. When it stormed, waters would fill the dry creek beds and rush around the cliffs where the burial caves were. The moisture would, of course, increase the smell of mold and rot. In the dry times, brushing against an old corpse would send a plume of dust into the air, and -- if you bent too close to the dust -- into your lungs, where fungal infections could take root.
What had made this man reduce himself to this level? Had someone he loved been imprisoned by the Romans? Even crucified? Had his lands been seized by some elder of the Jews who wanted more than he already had? Had his family died in front of his eyes? We don't know. We concentrate rather on the pigs running over the cliff, a "sure proof" that the man had become possessed by demons.
Well, no matter how we understand mental illness, it is absolutely true in a sense that this man was possessed of demons. Old memories he could not shake off, sadness that finally overcame him, anger that made him strong enough to break the chains others put on him in their fear: all of these possessed his mind and soul. We know that he was terrified of the power he saw in Jesus, because he "begged him repeatedly not to order [him] into the Abyss."
But Jesus spoke directly to those demons, recognizing what had driven the man mad, and at that, the sufferer willingly put on clothes, sat down with Jesus, and listened to what Jesus had to say. When others arrive on the scene, they see that the man is now "in his right mind" and their reaction is -- to beg Jesus to go away! Well, who knows what story this man has to tell that will be dangerous for those who played a part in his growing madness?
So Jesus goes away, as asked. But -- he leaves behind him a man who will return home and "tell how much God has done for him." And in doing so, may encourage others not to let the horrors we sometimes have to live through drive them mad.
Sandra Herrmann is a retired United Methodist pastor living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Marty's Flag
John Sumwalt
Galatians 3:23-29
As many of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
-- Galatians 3:28
After worship on Memorial Day weekend Jo and I drove to Richland County over in the hills of south west Wisconsin to visit the cemeteries where many of our family and friends are buried. We always look for the small American Flags waving over the graves of several relatives who fought in our nation's wars: Jo's dad, Lester Perry, who served in the Philippines in World War II; my dad, Leonard, who served in North Africa and Italy; Jo's ggg Grandfather, David Sommars, a Civil War veteran, who lost his left arm in the march with Sherman in the Atlanta campaign; and my ggg Grandfather, Edward John Long, another Civil War veteran, who took two bullets in his spine at the battle of Lookout Mountain, November 24, 1863.
This year we made a special trip to Basswood Cemetery in the southern part of the county not far from the Wisconsin River. My best friend from high school, Martin Elliot, is buried there. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War. Marty called me a few years after he was discharged to tell me that he was gay. He hadn't sorted that out when we were in school. This was in the days before "don't ask, don't tell." The policy then was "don't be." I have always wondered what that must have been like for him and the thousands of men and women like him who served under those circumstances in all of our nations wars.
As we searched for his head stone, I remembered attending Marty's funeral near his home in Key West, Florida, in 1995. I sat in a packed church behind his father and step-mother, both active church members in a United Methodist church. I recalled that Marty had come to worship and later became a member of another United Methodist church at my invitation. I wondered if our neighbors and friends, who had welcomed him when we were teenagers, would have done the same had they known what he would have dared not have told them even if he had known himself.
Jo spotted Marty's stone high up on the hillside in the Elliot family plot. To my surprise there was no flag honoring his service. I had come to take a picture of Marty's flag. I looked around at the hundreds of flags that marked the graves of other service men and women and decided that maybe it would be all right to borrow one just for a few minutes. Marty would have thought this was silly. No doubt he was laughing at me from heaven. I didn't care. As I snapped the picture I thought to myself, "It is only right that he receive the same honor as every one who served." I owed him that much. We all do.
John Sumwalt is the pastor of Our Lord's United Methodist Church in New Berlin, Wisconsin, and a noted storyteller. He is the author of nine books, including the acclaimed Vision Stories series and How to Preach the Miracles: Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It. John and his wife Jo Perry-Sumwalt served for three years as the co-editors of StoryShare. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), Sumwalt received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for parish ministry from UDTS in 1997.
**************
StoryShare, June 20, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
