It's 1944. Otto Steinke is too old to be drafted, his son just a few months too young. Besides, both are needed because the Allied cause requires mountains of food, food the Steinkes can produce on their Iowa farm. Not everyone can be a soldier—even some who really, really want to be.
The Pentecost story can be, for some like me, greatly intimidating—all that super-charged energy in wild-eyed praise of the risen Lord, sheer madness—enough to make some of us question our place on plastic chairs or hard wooden pews.
I first read about a Lakota giveaway on a Sunday morning in a book about the Yankton Sioux. Giveaways were a means by which wealth was distributed and people gained stature and strength.
In this world, people suffer. It comes with the territory. You can wish that fact not true, but you cannot wish it away. People suffer.
Jesus was human. He was us, for us.
It may never be ours here and now, but that doesn’t mean we throw in the towel on possibilities—possibilities and prayer, like the psalmist in the gorgeous Psalm 85.
