It’s time to revive the blog.

Why the two-year hiatus? It’s hard to say. Perhaps the ancient writer who penned “to everything there is a season”, if he or she were to write today, would add, “A time to blog, and a time to rest from blogging.”

But now is the time to revive the blog. So welcome to bits of life wanting to be shared, from pen and paintbrush, once again. Think of this message as the “mike check” before a worship service. “Check, check.” “Do you read me?”

At some point in fall of 2011, I took the pen name, Tumbleweed. A tumbleweed is a plant that has no roots, and floats from place to place on the wind. It shows up. Over the past few years I’ve shown up in a fair number of places, sometimes without much preplanning, and sometimes with only a smattering of the local language, because the wind carried me. A tumbleweed is by nature a wanderer, and insofar as the wind has purpose and direction, it is not lost, but rather, it is directed from place to place.

Tumbling is somewhat out of character for seminary interns and pastors, who find themselves in more of a stable lifestyle for the most part, and yet it takes the wind of the Spirit to get them into position in the first place.  And this same Spirit seems still to find ways to send us off on the breeze from time to time.   In this case, Luther Seminary is sending me off. My graduation is immanent and my internship is over, and there is this other bit as well: a longing to revisit a beloved place.  And lo and behold, along came a need and the means to meet the need, and the familiar nudge of the Spirit whispering, “You could do that.”

So in between the wonderful twenty-one months I’ve had at Bethesda Lutheran Church in Ames, and whatever new ventures God may be calling me to in the future, the wind of the Spirit is sending me off again on an interesting journey to revisit old friends and make new ones.   Last time I ended up teaching a song to our driver: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” It will be great to reconnect while making new friends at the same time.

Stay tuned to more details soon to come! It’s going to be an adventure. Hope you follow along!  Next stop: graduation!