Oliver was a friend, chaplain, professor, author, and loyal church reformer. This Gnesio-Lutheran giant will be missed.
We don’t need another brand. We need a people who remember who they are. And that’s us, Gen-X.
Just as each servant was sent to bring back the Master’s fruit, so did God send his prophets to bring back the fruits of a life shaped by the Word.

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There are several reasons why I nerd out when it comes to AMC’s The Walking Dead.
Mark Twain would have been proud of me. He once quipped that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you figure out why. Not only had I figured out why I came into this world; my answer defined me.
Have you ever watched The Matrix? Crazy movie, right? The thing that continually keeps reminding me of that movie is the last thing you’d probably think of, even though the movie is rife with motifs, themes, and analogies of it.
Case in point: Jonah. Calling this man to be a prophet makes about as much as sense as hiring an executioner to be the CEO of a hospital.
It’s like I’m eavesdropping on the two friends and the stranger who walks with them. Something about the way they hang their heads, something about the desperation in their voices, and certainly something about the stranger, has me grasping hold of every word as if gold is spilling from their lips.
I thought I had it all together. I had my life figured out. Even though outwardly I was serving God, inwardly I served only the god named Ego. My heart was the shrine at which I bowed the knee.
I woke up this morning feeling restless. It could be the 7,000 holiday calories I have eaten every day for the past two weeks or it could be that a new year has started and so follows the resolutions.
Yes, I pray, but it is the Spirit who prays for me, in me, through me. I no more make up my own prayers than I made up the English language.
The Son that He is sending into this world will need more than a mother; He needs a father.
One of the sad truths I realized about myself long ago is that I do nothing from completely spic-and-span motives. I mean nothing. When I hear someone say that they’re “utterly sincere” or they’re doing something “from pure motives,” I smell a lie.
We usually understand vocation in a very narrow sense; it’s your job, your “calling.” Vocation, however, is not so much what you do for a living but what Christ does through you for the living. It’s a 24/7 calling, not a 9 to 5 occupation.
The pastor put a hand over my mouth, another between my shoulder blades, and backward I fell into the dark waters, buried beneath Noah's flood, the Red Sea, Jordan's stream, all the way down into a borrowed tomb outside Jerusalem where a crucified man lay waiting for me.