True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 9.6.20 I have been talking with people, so many lately, who have suffered tremendous loss. Seems almost like a flood of loss floating on top of the collective loss we’ve all been experiencing this year. Loss of parents and children to death, overdose, loss of jobs, careers and vocations due to Covid and financial downturns. Losses that fundamentally change the ground of a person’s lif...

Dave Brisbin 8.30.20 I was asked this week by someone who said he always asks this question of someone he’s meeting for first time: what is the most important thing you’ve learned in life? My answer was immediate. Presence. He was surprised and said that no one has ever answered that way before. I asked how most people answered, and he said either love or virtue. My spiritual journey has been many...

Dave Brisbin 8.23.20 There are two basic ways we make choices. The first is with judgment—applying all we have experienced and learned to a particular situation or circumstance. We’ve been taught all our lives that it is wisdom to exercise good judgment. Then Jesus tells us not to judge. Are we supposed to throw out all the programming, the learned and experienced data of a lifetime that has helpe...

Dave Brisbin 8.16.20 Watching a spider hanging for days motionless in its web up in a remote corner of our ceiling gets me thinking about the purpose of a life lived only to keep on living. Obviously spiders have purpose in the ecosystem, but many people have been telling me during this pandemic lockdown that they feel caught in a Groundhog Day time loop, where every day is like every other, purpo...

Dave Brisbin 8.9.20 When I first began working in recovery, I heard an AA oldtimer emphatically say that he was grateful to be an alcoholic, and I couldn’t process that statement. How could alcoholism be a good thing? But now a couple decades later, I see how for him, the pain and trauma of his alcoholism created a hinge moment, a point in his life, because of his choice for recovery, that angled...

Dave Brisbin 8.2.20 A public debate we’ve been having for past few months and past sixty or seventy years is whether violence is necessary to effect needed political change in our society and law. Or can non-violent methods work just as well? Better? Both sides have persuasive arguments, so the debate continues. Martin Luther King brought non-violent resistance to the civil rights movement in the...

Dave Brisbin 7.26.0 Ever wonder why the world is the way it is? Why isn’t it some other way? Why is life so difficult? Why do we have to eat other living things to stay alive? Why is there so much evil in the world? Death and destruction? Hate, bias, racism, greed? Would you have created the world this way? And if you wouldn’t and God did, what does that say about God? If you haven’t asked these q...

Dave Brisbin 7.19.20 I was asked to talk about leadership last week, and I took a deep breath before responding because I realized what a loaded topic it was and how the request itself was coming from a profound disappointment in our current political leadership. I think I said I’d think about it, but the more I did, the more it seemed like it needed to be discussed. What makes a great leader? Whe...

Dave Brisbin 7.12.20 A friend makes the comment that being a Christian is really hard. I ask why. He says it’s hard to meet moral and ethical standards, understand theological and doctrinal concepts, and live the precepts of the church. Well, he doesn’t put it that way, but more or less what he means. He also says it’s hard to put up with the bias he sees in our media and culture and encounters in...

Dave Brisbin 7.5.20 My wife tells me we need to talk about hope on Sunday. It’s been so heavy lately, so much to process, so much disturbance, where do we look for hope? That’s the key isn’t it? To continue to find hope, to continue to trust that all will be well in any circumstance. I hear radio hosts glibly throwing around words like endurance, resilience, caring, mindfulness, but it feels true...

Dave Brisbin 6.28.20 The current unrest over race relations has opened and even forced the opportunity for honest discussion about race and persistent inequality in our country. Unfortunately amid the demonstrations and destruction, the extreme voices are the ones heard the loudest, and emotions and rhetoric are high. Is it possible in this climate to actually talk to one another, to learn things...

Dave Brisbin 6.14.20 I’m often asked about end times and the apocalyptic passages and books of the bible that support popular end times scenarios. But especially now, there is an increase of questioning as the events of the last few months appear to mirror much end times imagery. A recent survey showed 56% of a group of pastors believing that we are in end times, but what can scripture itself show...

Dave Brisbin 6.7.20 We’re sailing through a perfect storm of pandemic and protest driven issues that are raising deep questions and the need for reexamination of ourselves and our society. Can our scriptures help us at a time like this? I’m asked how we’re supposed to understand Romans 13 where Paul tells us to obey our state authorities no matter what—they are ordained by God. He tells us to pay...

Dave Brisbin 5.31.20 Pentecost Sunday: Though it’s the feast of Pentecost today, the week of protests and riots are the elephant in the room that demands some attention and discussion. But is there a link between our response to the strife and opposition around us and the deepest message of Pentecost? Or better, would our engagement in Pentecost temper our response to the opposition we face? Betwe...

Dave Brisbin 5.24.20 Thomas Merton wrote that the bible is, without question, one of the most unsatisfying books ever written until the reader comes to terms with it in a very special way. If you’ve never been unsatisfied by the bible, if you’ve never been perplexed, affronted, offended, even outraged by it, then it’s possible you’ve never seriously considered it. What are we to make of God orderi...

Dave Brisbin 5.17.20 As the outbreak crisis continues, fear is ramping up in us either directly or through its son and daughter emotions of anxiety, stress, anger, and depression, among others. It’s becoming painfully clear that our fear is now creating new problems and exacerbating others, which brought a quote to mind from another era: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Franklin Roos...

Dave Brisbin 5.10.20 Mothers’ Day. This pandemic and lockdown has pulled the veneer of so many of our fears in just the past two months, it raises the question: why so many of us who know God loves them are still experiencing so much fear? Did we miss a memo somewhere? A woman once told me she knew God loved her, but wondered how she could know if God liked her. May sound silly at first, that if G...

Dave Brisbin 5.3.20 The best part of being a pastor is being trusted enough to be invited into people’s lives. To see and be a part of their vulnerabilities and fears as well as joys and celebrations. And during this lockdown, many people I’m talking to have multiple losses and difficult circumstances layered over the quarantine crisis. And each one, whether a death, illness, unemployment, homeles...

Dave Brisbin 4.26.20 Everything in the New Testament is geared toward creating in us a fundamental shift in perspective. To experience the process of learning to see life through the Father’s eyes. To see life in all its complexity, diversity, contradiction, even absurdity of pain and joy from the viewpoint of the one thing it all comes from, is sustained by, and ultimately is. When we can begin t...

Dave Brisbin 4.19.20 As I talk to more and more people being worn down by quarantine lockdown to where some are in real distress, the point is hammered home that our faith, spirituality, and the message we convey must be relevant and useful enough to meet people at their point of need. If the gospel as we understand it isn’t relevant, if it remains abstract—however beautiful as a concept—what good...

Dave Brisbin 4.12.20 Easter Sunday: On Easter, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, we celebrate Easter virtually via streaming with our community watching a live stream from their homes, setting their own communion tables to fully participate remotely together. Though missing each other’s company, in the following days, it was wonderful to hear how individuals and families created their own sacre...

Dave Brisbin 4.5.20 Palm Sunday: On the first day of Holy Week—the week before Easter Sunday that recounts the events of the last week of Jesus’ life and circumstances of his death—the church celebrates Palm Sunday, named for the palm branches waved and laid before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem for the last time. The church has dubbed it the triumphal entry, but Jesus himself considered it a trage...

Dave Brisbin 3.29.20 Fascinating thing about human nature is that we will do almost anything to avoid uncertainty and find meaning in the events and circumstances around us. And the bigger the event or circumstance, the bigger the cause needs to be to give the event the meaning we crave. But events, circumstances, and object don’t have meaning in themselves—they’re inanimate objects. If a tree fal...

Dave Brisbin 3.22.20 On the first Sunday of COVI-19 lockdown, streaming to those in self-isolation, the surreal quality of living the reality of a pandemic outbreak is amplified. In just a week of lockdown, many of us are already strongly feeling the effects of disconnection from each other and the regular routines of life that once connected us. How can we best help each other in times like these...

Dave Brisbin 3.15.20 There’s an elephant in the room, and there’s no sense not addressing it. The COVID-19 outbreak is unprecedented in the way it is changing our way of life, and there’s a sense that things may never be the same, just as they never were after 9/11. With schools, churches, conventions, restaurants, sporting events, all public venues shutting down, with supermarket shelves empty an...