The summer before Tera and I were married, we bought a marimba together.

A quick story: Rev. Paul Setterholm was a missionary in Japan following World War II (1952-1975) and needed a way to lead hymns when conducting worship. In an era when pianos and keyboards weren’t readily available, especially in some of the rural areas, Paul would drive from place to place, transporting his 4 octave instrument (think big xylophone with more resonance) and family in their little car, to share the good news of Jesus in a landscape still reeling from the devastation of war.

In each location, Pastor Setterholm would not only preach a sermon and preside over Holy Communion, but would also be the musician along with his wife and children. Huddling around the six foot long instrument, there was plenty of room for a variety of mallets to play multiple melody and harmony parts for congregational songs.

Many years later, I was in several bands with Paul’s son, Joel, while we both lived in Minneapolis. When visiting his parents in the area, Joel’s dad would often play for us. I marveled at the beauty of the rosewood keys and the deep rich tone pouring from the instrument and heard story after story about this incredible instrument played around the world!

Toward the end of Paul’s life, I had the opportunity to purchase the marimba. Even though we weren’t sharing bank accounts, yet, I knew that I had to consult my future bride if I wanted to entertain the idea of any additional percussion instruments being brought into our soon-to-be home. Not to mention spending a hefty amount of money while we were trying to save up for a wedding.

Fast-forward 30 years. The instrument now lives in our home and continues to bring joy to many as it approaches its 90th birthday. Our youngest child is a percussionist, too, and has spent years playing and studying percussion, including hours and hours of scales on the 1938 Deagan marimba. The same rich tone I first heard in North Minneapolis now resonates in West Chester.

My good friend Joel died Thanksgiving weekend following several years of living with cancer. While his physical presence is gone, his intelligent humor, expansive compassion, musical legacy, and yearning for justice and peace in the name of Jesus will continue to loom large in our lives and home. 

Legacy is a powerful thing. Our lives are a beautiful collection of those we meet. Each conversation, meal, walk, and moments of collaboration make an imprint in our lives and faith.

As we approach the threshold of a new year, I invite you to give thanks for those who have impacted your life and faith. If they are still living, take a moment to visit, call, text, or write and share a word of gratitude for their impact on your life. At the same time, consider how God is using you—in a myriad of ways—to pass on the gifts of faith. Your compassionate and courageous words, bold and loving actions, generous financial contributions, and grace-laced prayers have the power to bring transformation and renewal.

“Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy.”
- Saint Francis of Assisi

You might not see it or feel it, but that doesn’t mean that the promises of Jesus don’t resonate through your life to bring hope and joy to the world.

Come, Lord Jesus, come!
Pastor Lowell

“Stir up our hearts, Lord God, to prepare the way of your only Son…”

Every week in the four Sundays of Advent, our Prayer of the Day in worship begins “Stir up:”

“Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and Come.”
“Stir up our hearts, Lord God.”
“Stir up the wills of all.”
“Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come.”

During one of my first Advent seasons as a pastor, my senior pastor told me how ancient these prayers were and that they had apparently remained relatively unchanged for 1000 years or more. I was fascinated as I considered how these prayers were connecting us to people of past times and spaces.

I imagined my prairie ancestors–1880s Scandinavian settlers–in their newly constructed square white clapboard churches, steeple cradling a bell on the North Dakota prairie. Winter wind's personality intruding through closed windows and doors, piling snow at the feet of people with names like Mons and Martha Rasmussen–who prayed "stir up our hearts, O Lord,” as their beloved relatives in Fitar, Norway shared the same words–though they would never share the same pew again.

"Stir up our hearts, O Lord" prayed my missionary grandfather in the Pele language of Liberia in 1946. Praying the words in a mud brick church built only a year before. “Stir up our hearts” they prayed, as they gazed upon a carved mahogany Christ family nativity. Baby Jesus with wooly hair resting in the manger while my two-week old infant mother slept, wrapped in bands of cloth, laying on my grandmother's chest.

"Stir up our hearts, O Lord" spoken today by you and I in mundane suburbs, live-streams taking our words to living rooms of people across town or across the country. Listeners unaware the words they hear hold a millennia of repetition.

Words of prayer that, God willing, will be heard by babies no person alive today will ever live long enough to meet. Babies, who will be baptized centuries from now when the chapters of our lives have been written and we have joined the company of saints… “Stir up our hearts, O Lord.”

May our hearts be stirred by the hope and promise of the coming Emmanuel–Word made flesh. May we be filled with the same Advent joy and hope as the Scandinavian immigrants who longed for the coming Christ child in a new land. May it bring peace as deep as it did to those Liberian babies who rested in their mothers' arms while my grandfather spoke. May it stir in those who hear us speak these words, so they may continue to pass along the faith first given to us.

Let us pray: Stir up our hearts, Lord, so we may share your love with generations yet unborn. Thank you for the saints whose hearts were stirred and made your love known to us. AMEN.

Praying with you,
Pastor Tracy Paschke-Johannes

I stopped by Drug Mart on the way home yesterday and had to weave my way through the onslaught of Christmas merchandise filling the aisles already. Here we go…the biggest season for me of working on balance and priorities has begun. Don’t get me wrong, I do love Christmas, but it also adds stress to my sense of being in the world.

One Christmas, all my daughter wanted was a Barbie Train. She never really asked for much so I was determined to give her this hot item on everyone’s Christmas list. It was expensive, it took stops at several stores, and I finally found one across town (this was before online shopping). I was overjoyed that we could give her what her heart desired.

She was thrilled when she opened it, and her Barbies rode that train for several days. But after the initial glow wore off, the train was parked in the corner for weeks. When I asked her why she wasn’t playing with it anymore, she said in her sweetest 7-year-old voice, “The commercials made it look more fun than it really is.” What an astute observation for both of us. The worldly things that we think will bring us happiness, frequently don’t.

Throughout the year and especially in the holiday season, I can get caught up in materialism and expectations. I know I still battle in my head when I’m at the store or looking online. What do I really need? Is this the gift that will bring real joy? I have the money, but is this my priority? What is enough? Even setting a budget doesn’t always soothe my heart.

I try to live my life generously. I know first-hand the freedom and peace that it can bring. Using my time and treasures to help others and support organizations that do good in the world lifts my soul more than any material items. So, why do I struggle with the desire for worldly things? How about you? What are your struggles with materialism and expectations?

I will continue to pray that on my journey of faith I remember the lesson of the Barbie Train: The shiny things in the world that can suck us in usually don’t bring us the joy that we anticipate. They don’t outweigh the peace of knowing that my treasures and hopes are in Jesus alone. That joy comes from sharing our time and gifts in ways that lift others up and do good in the world. I’m praying we all enter this season grounded in the sustaining love and hope of Jesus. It will be the guiding light for our priorities.

Peace always,
Angie Seiller, Director of Faith Formation

Sometimes it is easy. It is easy to go help your best friend with a project or give them a gift when you happen upon something that reminds you of them. It is easy to care about causes that affect you, personally. It is easy to be kind with people you identify with or who you already know. It is easy to be generous with your time when you enjoy doing the activity you are being asked to perform. It is easy to spend money when we feel passionate about something we want or give to a charity we have a vested interest in supporting.

It isn’t as easy to be helpful when we aren’t feeling our best. Or to care about a cause that we are barely aware of. Or to be kind when we are angry at someone. Or give up our precious downtime when we know we aren’t going to enjoy something. Or spend our hard-earned money when we aren’t invested in the recipient.

Most of our decisions to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God aren’t even as easy to categorize as easy or hard. There is this whole grey area where we know the right thing to do, but we feel meh about it or just don’t wanna. We end up expending a bunch of energy deciding whether to spend our time, abilities, and money on something we know is good, but doesn’t make us feel anything. And each of us can only do so much with the resources we have.

So where do we put our energy?

Well, I can’t answer that for you. How we choose to spend what we have is tied to our individual core values, and those are as different for each of us as the gifts we have to share. But Jesus gives us some really helpful hints that might help us in our discernment.

First, he tells each of us to love your neighbor as yourself. He didn’t say, "Love your neighbor who looks like you, thinks like you, or gives you good vibes." This immediately pulls us out of that 'easy' zone and challenges us to look beyond our immediate comfort. It means being kind to the coworker who always annoys you, or donating to a disaster relief effort on a continent you'll likely never visit. It pushes us toward the uncomfortable good.

Second, Jesus models a focus on the marginalized and the unseen. He didn't just spend time with his friends; he sought out the sick, the poor, the outcast, and the people society actively avoided. This is perhaps the greatest litmus test for that "meh" feeling. When you’re faced with an opportunity to do good, ask yourself: "Who benefits if I say 'yes,' and is that person or cause being overlooked by everyone else?" If it's a cause that doesn't affect your community directly, or a person who can offer you nothing in return—that's often where the truest kind of love is required. That’s where you have to rely on your values, not your feelings.

The goal isn't to make every single decision a painful sacrifice. That’s a recipe for burnout, not justice. The goal is to consistently shift our baseline of "easy" and "hard" so that the 'meh' decisions start leaning toward generosity.

Think of it like spiritual weightlifting. We start by being generous when it’s easy. Then, we intentionally step into that grey area and push ourselves to do one small, good thing that we really don't feel like doing. Maybe it’s an extra $5 to a random charity, spending an hour helping with a thankless task, or genuinely listening to a viewpoint you disagree with.

We are all limited, but we are also all called. Instead of letting that 'meh' feeling paralyze you, let Jesus’s model be your simple, witty guiding principle: Go where the love is needed, not where the love is easy. Do that enough times, and you might find that the 'hard' becomes a little less so, and the 'meh' starts feeling a lot more like 'yes.'

Discerning with you,

John

Last summer, I spent six weeks doing some rehabilitation on my right knee. It had been pestering me every once in a while since a bicycle wreck a few years ago, but the pain and swelling increasingly grew and began to limit my mobility. A central part of my physical therapy was stretching. Working the knee, as well as the adjacent muscles and tissue, was the best path to health. I stretched to restore and strengthen. I stretched for flexibility in the future.

Micah 6:8 reminds us that the Great Physician has prescribed a series of movements to restore us to health, too. Doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God don’t always come naturally to us, but they are the path to helping us love God and our neighbors with our whole being. The Micah mandate requires us to move, serve, and bend in ways that activate our entire being.

Part of these stretches are restorative. We all yearn for a deeper relationship with God and long to hear the Holy Spirit speaking to us, inviting us into God’s compassion even as we care for others and creation. Another part of our stretching is future focused, preparing us for where we hope to be. Flexibility in our heart and mind opens pathways for motions and activities we haven’t yet considered.

Doing justice is a stretch. It pushes us beyond a static yearning and hope. What would it look like for God to activate our hearts and minds to pray, speak, and act in the ways of justice? How can we invite and empower others to do the same?

Loving kindness is a stretch. Kindness is good, but all too often we are reluctant to fully embrace it. Imagine how we would be transformed—how the world would be changed—if we actually loved kindness! What would it look like for God to open our hearts and minds to celebrating moments of kindness?

Walking humbly with God is a stretch. When we do justice and love kindness, we begin to think that we are self-sufficient. Our hubris takes over. What would it look like for us to recognize that there are always more ways for us to stretch, learn, and grow and let curious humility lead us?

I’m grateful that Lord of Life is a healthy and resilient community and hope that stretching of the heart, soul, mind, and strength continues to be part of the rhythm of our lives together. As I look at our calendar for the coming month, there are many opportunities to stretch us. Have you considered welcoming Family Promise guests, donating food for Reach Out Lakota’s Fill the Gap, or serving at Matthew 25? How would you be stretched if you served in worship on a Sunday morning or helped with children or youth?

Looking at the proposed Mission Spending Plan for 2026, I see us positioning ourselves for a vibrant future as we consider an additional pastor, upgrade our main restrooms, care for our campus, and continue to grow our generosity in our community and around the world.

Centering ourselves in God’s promises, let’s stretch so we can be a healthy body of Christ. I pray that our lives can bring more justice, kindness, and humility to the world in Jesus’ name.

Stretching toward a future with Hope,
Pastor Lowell Michelson

Be sure to join us for Celebration Sunday – November 16! We’ll give thanks for where we’ve been in 2025 and gear up for 2026 as we select new leaders, vote for our 2026 Mission Spending Plan, and share a meal together.

While working as the director of a preschool, I would get kids out of the car for morning drop-off. Many times, even before saying hello, their first comment to me, as they beamed with excitement, would be “look at my new shoes” or they would just wiggle them in my face until I noticed. Above all other pieces of clothing, shoes were the biggest thing to show off. As a teacher, I then had to walk the balance of meeting their happiness without emphasizing that their self-worth was tied to something new and shiny.

This past month, we encountered a young man who was attending a self-help program at Lord of Life. He had hopes for a new start in life and was lamenting that he couldn’t afford a pair of work shoes that were critical to getting started at his new job. In addition, we had an unhoused person who came to LOL looking for assistance. The blue barrel overflowing with shoes gave hope to both. Digging through the shoes, we found a pair that could minimally be called work shoes that didn’t quite fit, but the young man was thrilled with the find. Unfortunately, even though our mound of shoes was huge, we were unable to find a pair that fit the other person. However, we were able to assist him in securing a place to sleep for a night and provided some additional monetary and food help.

The pile of shoes that we recently gathered as part of The Faith Alliance collection has been a reminder of how critical shoes can be both physically and metaphorically in acting justly, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God (Micah 6:8). They can provide dignity, protection, comfort, and even joy to youth and “God moments” to others in our community who feel the crushing stigma of poverty and hopelessness with insurmountable circumstances in their daily lives. A new pair of shoes and people who recognize their humanity can lead to confidence, hope, and a new lease on life.

This fall has been incredibly busy at LOL with us stretching ourselves to live generously and working together for the good of the community. I pray that the huge pile of shoes will stay in our memory as a reminder of the goodness we can do together with God’s help and guidance. Or that each time we look at our own shoes or our well-stocked closet, we can find empathy, kindness, and generous hearts for others who find themselves without the dignity, comfort, and peace that even one pair of shoes can bring.

Where is God leading you next to act justly, love kindness, and walk humbly with God? How can we support each other in being the heart and “sole” to uplift others up as the constant love of Jesus Christ lifts and sustains us daily?

Walking with you in God’s grace and peace,
Angie Seiller, Director of Faith Formation

P.S. We collected 182 pairs of shoes to add to the other 416 collected by the other churches in Faith Alliance for a total of 598 pairs! A generous donor also pledged $5/pair (up to $2500) for even more new shoe purchases!