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Mid-Week Missive |
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| Author: | Brad Miller | Created: | 10/30/2007 2:52 AM |  | | What is happening at BCC? |
| How Important is the Bible? | |
| By Brad Miller on6/30/2010 8:11 AM | |
| Greetings!
I gave up a long time ago recommending movies to people because I discovered that movies that I find riveting don’t always hit other people the same way. (Isn’t that right Rev. Jennifer?) These days the only two movies I wholeheartedly recommend are “Field of Dreams” (especially for fathers, sons, and baseball fans) and “Ordinary People”, a profoundly real movie about the pain and heartbreak and joy of life in late 20th century America. Those are probably my two favorite movies of all time, although any good (or bad for that matter) Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn or Cary Grant movie is always a good bet.
Now, all of this is my way of leading to saying that I saw a movie this week that got me to thinking, but this is not, I repeat, this is not a recommendation for people to see it. Some might like it; many would not. Having said all that, I recently saw a movie called “The Book of Eli” starring Denzel Washington. It was one of those p ... |  | |
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| | Facing Fear | |
| By Brad Miller on6/22/2010 2:18 PM | |
| Greetings on another steamy day,
Recently Carol and I went to a play in which one of the characters uttered this line: “It scares me so much that I just know I have to do it.” As the line was delivered, I knew that even though it got a big laugh from the audience, it was profound and instructive beyond the attention given it. It was used to illustrate what a free spirit the person who uttered it was and it served it’s purpose well. It got me thinking about times I had stepped up to my fears, and what the result of that was.
When I was about 14 our Boy Scout troop was chosen as the Governors Honor Guard, which meant that we got to spend two weeks on Mackinac Island in a barracks behind the Governors summer residence. We put up the flag every morning, we worked as guides in Fort Michilimackinac, we got to meet the governor and his wife, and each day about 3:00 we got to go to the Grand Hotel swimming pool. The Grand Hotel is an enormous turn of the century hot ... | | |
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| | Sunday June 6, 2010 "Are You Happy?" Psalm 146 | |
| By Brad Miller on6/8/2010 1:49 PM | |
| We live in a society that holds happiness as one of the great goals of life. Our marketing culture points to happiness with almost every advertisement we see. You certainly can’t be happy unless you have the latest, the most stylish, the fastest, the cleanest, the tastiest, the best. Our consumer culture is based on the notion that we need things to be happy.
But it goes even deeper than that. We look to our leaders to provide that happiness, too. Every election cycle, which now is every day of every year, we see people running for office that market themselves much like Madison Avenue markets consumer goods. And what they are selling is the fact that their candidate can make us happy. Oh, this is not a new phenomenon: from the 1920’s on, the theme song for one of our two major political parties has been “Happy Days are Here Again!”
It’s not just our leaders and our consumer culture that places such a big emphasis on happiness. How many parents have told ... | | |
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| | Sabbath | |
| By Brad Miller on6/3/2010 2:15 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day,
I got a new phone a while back.
Oh, it’s not just any phone, it’s the phone that George Jetson could only dream about. On this phone I can check the weather, the stocks, the scores of the Tigers game, answer my e-mail, surf the web, get a joke of the day, a Bible verse a day, tune my guitar (like anyone would notice), order movie tickets, read the newspaper – the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press and the USA Today – read a book, listen to music, watch a tv show, keep my calendar, use it as a compass, use it as a flashlight, use it as a level, get new recipes, check the time in Brussels (hey, I might want to, I have a friend there) play solitaire, find a restaurant, look at a picture of my house from space, look at a picture of your house from space, read a book, add more cowbell whenever needed, identify music on the radio just by holding it up to the speaker, locate my car in a mall parking ... | | |
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| | Remembering Ernie | |
| By Brad Miller on5/12/2010 3:42 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful morning,
Yesterday, I lost one of my heroes. Oh, and I’m not alone. I would guess that millions of people heard of his death and stopped for at least a moment, and remembered Ernie Harwell, who died at the age of 92 after a year long battle with cancer.
Ernie Harwell was “The Voice of the Detroit Tigers” for 42 years, after short stints in New York and Baltimore. In the 1980’s he became the first still-active broadcaster to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is also a resident of the Radio Hall of Fame, the Michigan Hall of Fame and the Sports Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He was the only announcer to be traded for a player! In the late 1940’s, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers wanted to hire Ernie to be the Dodgers broadcaster, but Ernie was under contract as the announcer of the Atlanta Crackers. So, a deal was struck: Ernie went to Brooklyn in exchange for Dodgers backup catcher Cliff Dapper. And the rest, as they s ... | | |
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| | Paying Attention | |
| By Brad Miller on4/21/2010 8:49 AM | |
| Greetings!
On Monday and Tuesday of this week I had the privilege of attending a workshop put on by Fred Craddock and Mike Graves called “The Preacher as Storyteller”. It was a wonderfully enlightening couple of days as it always is when Fred Craddock is involved. Not only is he probably the finest preacher I have ever heard, he is one of the finest people I have ever met. We got to know each other when we served as founding board members of the Atlanta United Divinity Center a few years back and I still count that as an amazing blessing. Whenever I get the chance to listen to him preach or teach, I come away with something that keeps me thinking.
On Tuesday morning Fred told a story about a waitress he met at a Waffle House. He asked for cream for his coffee and she reached into her apron and pulled out about 6 of the little creamer cups. He said that he only needed one and she said, “It’s better to have more than you need than to need more than you have.” ... | | |
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| | Remembering | |
| By Brad Miller on4/14/2010 8:37 AM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day,
Remembering can lead us to a lot of different places.
This thought crossed my mind this Sunday during Rev. Jennifer’s communion meditation. She said something along the lines that when Jesus said, “Remember me” at the Last Supper, he probably meant more than just, “think of me fondly.” He probably meant that we were to do certain things, act a certain way, as a way to “remember” him. And I think she was right.
It crossed my mind again earlier this week when I realized that my mother’s birthday is just around the corner. She’s been gone almost 12 years and the overwhelming feeling I get when I remember her is one of gratitude. Gratitude that I was so blessed to have her as my mother. Sometimes funny stories pop into my head, times when she laughed so hard she started to cry and then the laughter/crying turned into that weird noiseless laughter that left her coughing for breath. I remember times with fam ... | | |
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| | New Beginnings | |
| By Brad Miller on4/13/2010 1:52 PM | |
| Greetings on this beautiful day,
What a day we had on Sunday! It was a wonderful celebration of the great gift we have been given: new life through Jesus Christ. The music was wonderful from start to finish; the celebration of baptisms reminded us once again of what it means to be part of the Body of Christ; the baby dedications moved us to rededicate our lives to nurturing and supporting the youngest and most precious of those among us; and the welcoming of a new member lets us know that our fellowship is a vital witness to those seeking a community of faith. It was, in a word, fantastic!
Our challenge, as always, is to not let that celebration slip away from us. I firmly believe that the more we keep Easter front and center, the more we live our lives as Easter people, the more vital and fulfilling our ministry will be to all who cross our paths. Join us in the coming weeks as we seek to carry over that Easter celebration into our work in the community, our ... | | |
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| | It's almost here... | |
| By Brad Miller on3/31/2010 3:23 PM | |
| Greetings on this gorgeous day!
It has already happened…but we need it to happen again. It is almost here…but still, it seems a long way off.
That in a nutshell is what Easter seems to be all about. We will gather on Sunday to celebrate the fact that the resurrection did happen, yet we still ache for resurrection in our own lives. We know that it is almost here, but can’t it just hurry up? As much as I love Lent and the buildup to Easter…as much as I love the celebration that will take place on Sunday all over the world…as much as I thankful for what Easter means to us all, I wonder sometimes if we don’t do the celebration a disservice by concentrating so much energy on one particular celebration on one particular day.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: the resurrection of Jesus is the most amazing, miraculous, life changing event I can even imagine. I give thanks every day for the fact that through Jesus, death has been overcome. I revel in each ... | | |
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| | From the Winter Comes the Spring | |
| By Brad Miller on3/24/2010 9:00 AM | |
| Greetings!
Today is one of those days when winter seems like a distant memory…
Well, okay, not so distant. Monday morning about 8:00 a.m. I sat down at my desk, turned on my computer and waited for it to boot up so I could check my e-mail. As it was coming up, I glanced out the window to see…SNOW! And not just a flake or two that I had to strain to see and wonder if it really was snow…SNOW! Flurries that danced all around in front of me. I was in shock. Of course, it stopped within about 5 minutes, nothing stuck to the ground and it turned out to be a reasonably nice day. But still, I thought, “Please! I can’t take it any more!” I was reminded of a cousin of mine who went to college at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. Marquette is about as far north as you can get in Michigan and is known for long, harsh winters. When he enrolled there he was looking forward to lots of skiing and snow-shoeing and outdoor winter activities. He reveled ... | | |
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