Sam Luce's Blog

The Reader by Jean-Honore Fragonard

Mark Twain famously said in a speech that a classic is “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Classics, like all beautiful things, grow more beautifully in time. Yet they require us to apporch them intentally. One of the reasons I decided to get an M.A. in Classical Studies was that I wanted to read whole chunks of the Western canon, but I knew I needed the accountability and Biblical framework that a Seminary setting provided. ...

I did the math. I only have time to read 1,820 books. So the pressure to be more selective is real. (If I live to be 85 years old and read 52 books a year) I’d like to share a list of books you must read.

Growing up on the move, books were my friends. It was people like Beverly Cleary, Paul Hutchens, and Franklin Dixson who moved with me. They helped me make sense of new places and feel the comfort that comes with reading characters I had grown to love. Good stories ground you even when you never...

Art by Laura Makabresku

The first time I remember kissing a girl, I was six, and she was six. She kissed me. I was standing by my desk getting ready to leave, packing my stuff to go. She came straight to me, but surprised me as much as coming from behind me. She grabbed my face and kissed me. This wasn’t my first kiss when I was four, a pastor's daughter laid an unforeseen kiss on me as our family was leaving. I don’t remember this, but my mom and dad have irrefutable photographic evidence.

I don...

Rembrandt’s paint

I have three prints of Rembrandt’s paintings, and I am about to add a fourth. They all paint a picture of what the Art of Pastoral Ministry is all about.

Three Trees—This print reminds me that pastoral ministry is so often judged by fruitfulness rather than faithfulness. Fruit comes from trees, and fruit is to be enjoyed and celebrated. Early in my pastoral ministry, the temptation was to accomplish, produce, and become. These trees remind me that my fruitfulness doesn’t come fr...

Frederick Buechner’s Prose.

Few writers grip me when I read them like Buechner does.

He came into my life when I needed him most. He taught me the following things I didn’t know or had forgotten.

Homesickness

“The word home summons up a place—more specifically a house within that place—which you have rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you think you belong and which in some sense belongs to you, a place where y...

This is part 1 of a 3-part series on the Art of Pastoral Ministry

I have always loved art. I took every art class the schools I attended allowed. Art reproduces beauty. It tells the truth by echoing God’s proclamation after his creation came into being by words. He would say, “Let there be,” followed by, “It is good.”

What we create comes from the good stuff that God spoke into reality. Truth himself spoke and created the beauty around us, including us,...

I am a third-generation pastor. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. One of the challenges of pastoral ministry is the reality that there is no off switch. There is no shortage of crises. You are never off the clock. I have seen the damage this can do to the pastor's family. The pastor can be tempted to find their value in their work at the expense of their family. The family can often blame the church for their struggles and difficulties.

Being a pastor is all I know. I grew up in a pas...

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedTo be in betweenYou are not where youWere and not where you will be, butNow in the Dark. The darkness of theIn between.Expectations slainBuried hope now underground.Hopes are goneThe consolation of friends.Only memories of what wasAnd what could have been.Could it be that in our SorrowThat we should persist as we began?Unknowing of what we can't see is tomorrowA new beginning. The difficulty of new is...

Words are holy. They’re not just means of communication. They’re containers of presence.
Eugene Peterson

This Monday is my blogging birthday. I started a regular habit of writing 18 years ago. My desire was to be to other people what I wished someone had been for me. To give my five loaves and two fish to Jesus and see what he would do. Like most things that God calls us to He calls us to things beyond our ability and equips us to become who he already knows we are.

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I started writing ...

I always loved science class. Math? Not so much. I loved science until it joined forces with math and had a baby named physics. Biology and chemistry were beautiful. Learning how our world was made—beyond our explanations and only in the mind of a Creator—fascinated me. Worthless carbon turning into something of inestimable worth is wild. Somewhat valuable gold made more valuable by fire and heat. Pearls formed from worthless sand in the shell of an oyster at the bottom of the sea.

In seasons of ...