Latest Reflections
Stories of faith, memory, Scripture, and the quiet ways grace meets us in ordinary life.
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Before Matt Damon Was Odysseus, My Dad Read Me Homer
What an ancient story, a new Matt Damon film, and my father’s bedtime voice taught me about the journey There are some books we remember because we read them and there are others we remember because someone we loved read them to us. For me, Homer’s Odyssey belongs to the second kind. Christopher Nolan’s new…
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The Grandfathers Who Taught Me How to Live
Two men born twenty-one days apart in the summer of 1923. Two boys shaped by the Great Depression. Two grandfathers who taught me that a good life is built less by extraordinary moments than by showing up for the ordinary ones. There are certain coincidences in a family that do not seem particularly remarkable when…
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One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace
I suppose there are easier ways to decide to write a book. Some people begin with an idea, perhaps a subject they have studied for years. Others have always dreamed of seeing their name on the cover of something. That really is not how 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death happened. In fact, for…
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Grandpa Barney’s Papillion: The Hometown That Raised Me
There are places that athat are written into your bones. For me, that place is Papillion, Nebraska. It is the place where I was born, and raised. The place where I learned what it meant to belong to a community. Even if I didn’t yet have the words to explain it. And, by the grace…
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Home Beyond The Crest of The Hill
“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” — Psalm 16:6 There are places in this world that seem to possess a soul of their own. Not because the soil itself is holy, the trees whisper secrets, or ghosts linger in forgotten corners. Rather, because God often…
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The Four Svagera Brothers: Walking Home Together One Last Time
Today we laid my great-uncle Eugene “Eug” Svagera to rest. With that simple act, an era quietly came to an end. The four Svagera brothers, Charlie, Joe, George (“Red”), and Eugene (“Eug”)are together once again. As I sat in the Church during Mass today, I could not help but think that perhaps no four brothers ever shared…
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Jan Hus: A Martyr for Truth Before His Time
On Jan Hus Day, the Czech Republic remembers a priest burned for heresy. But was Jan Hus truly a heretic, or did he simply uncover the wound too early?
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The America I Hope We Never Lose
This is the third and final reflection in my Independence Day trilogy. The first looked upward to Mount Rushmore and the ideals upon which America was built. The second remembered my Grandpa Svagera, born on July 4, 1923, and the generation that defended those ideals. This final reflection looks closer to home, to the neighborhoods,…
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Born Into the Promise: A Fourth of July Reflection
For the first few years of my life, I did not know what the Fourth of July was really about. I did not know about the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the year 1776. The long and complicated story of America, with all its glory and all its wounds, all its promise and…
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