Schedule the evaluation at the same time you schedule everything else. It’s just as important as everything else, so why leave it to the end-of-program crunch of everybody’s schedule. Put it on your schedule at the beginning.

Then, have a tool. It doesn’t need to be a complicated evaluation; the simple questions What Worked and What Could Be Better are all you really need. Of course, “worked” means you’re clear on what your program was trying to do; useful evaluation depends on clear goals and objectives.

In between weddings on Saturday I stood in my office and nervously watched Kiddo’s cheer team compete at the Big Meet in Florida, the one we’ve been fundraising for since early April.

Her team was much smaller than the others in the competition, nine members to the standard 15 or 20. The difficulty in their routine was clearly less than their competitors, and they dropped one of their stunts. They did not advance.

Yet there they were. The youngest ones seven years old and the oldest only 14, representing a gym that has never earned a bid to a national meet before. Good on them, and good on everyone who offered support over the last month.

There were roughly 5,000 pages of reading assigned for this first semester of my new academic venture, and I am not going to get them all read in time. That is partly because the way I am reading, which is to underline and notate in the margins and then, at several page intervals, type up those notations in a Word document. I’m basically trading speed for depth.

In school, as in life, that’s a trade with benefits and costs.

You have to love it.

Criticize it, analyze it, mock it: as long as you love it I’ll follow you in it.

I listened to my first Game of Thrones podcast yesterday. I’ve been a viewer from the beginning, never veering so far into fandom as to listen to podcasts about the show, but Sunday’s “The Longest Night” tipped me. There was just too much. I needed to hear committed people talk about it.

The best ones love it.

What matters more than production or insight in the quality of a podcast is love–the people making it love the thing it’s about. You can tell when they don’t, when they’re detached and above it all, and it’s so much less interesting.

No matter your work, if you love your subject we probably will too.,

“Confirmation is a beginning, not an ending.” I say it a gazillion times over the course of the year, from the introductory meeting with parents to the presentation of the confirmands to the congregation.

Saying it is doesn’t make it so, though. I think there is something else that needs to be said to make the statement more of a reality.

“See you next week.”

Even better, “See you at youth group next week” or “See you at choir next week” or “See you in worship next week” or see-you-at-anything-the-congregation-does next week. Like, right away.

Maybe it helps to have a concrete next step.

There’s only enough coffee in the canister for one cup.

This is the “worse” of “for better or for worse.”

My friend is leading a prayer before the U.S. House of Representatives, and he’s worried about his prayer being perceived as “too political.” I shared with him a quote I encountered this week, a paraphrase of John Howard Yoder in a book called Evangelism after Christendom: “The question is not whether the Christian should be political or not. The question is rather to what sort of politics the Christian is called.”

The author also observes that “The interpretation of Jesus’ life and ministry as apolitical is itself a political option.”

This is not mere wordplay. The impact on politics of women and men of faith who try to avoid the “political” is tangible. It affects not only who gets elected, but also where public moneys get appropriated and which laws become enacted.

We can’t not be political. Living is political, especially when it’s done collectively, as by a church.

It was warm enough yesterday morning to allow me to walk to a train station that’s about 30 minutes away for my morning commute, rather than the one that’s five minutes from the school where I drop Daughter off at 8:15.

Just a few minutes into that walk I ran into someone from my church. They were leaving a dentist appointment. We had a pleasant, brief, exchange, and then I continued on my walk.

Perhaps 10 minutes after that I passed someone else from the church, a coworker, on the sidewalk. We shared a surprised “Hi!” as we passed one another, and neither of us broke stride.

Finally, just a block from my destination, a third encounter with a church person. We walked the last two minutes together, talking about his recent trip to Amsterdam and Paris.

There’s nothing like a little sunshine and two walking feet.

I spent last Friday morning reading the “faith narratives” that my church’s 27 Confirmation students wrote. They range in length from a few paragraphs to three pages, and they express a wide spectrum of understanding–the Bible, the church, God: there’s a lot in there, and a lot of it I don’t remember teaching.

And yet the thing I have decided to care most about in these narratives is desire. Do these students want to be part of the church? If they do (and we work hard to give them a real choice to say they don’t), then the understanding they express comes in a distant second place; we can work with desire.

Confirmation is invitation to young people to say “yes” to faith. We grow with them from there.

I had an evening to myself and I wanted to watch a movie. I don’t do that often in the day-to-day march of work, parenting, and helping to run a household, so it was an enticing opportunity. But what to watch?

Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, HBO Now: I have access to all of these services, and all of them will generate recommendations for me. There is an algorithm under all of their hoods that knows my age, gender, zip code, my viewing history, and who knows what else. A recommendation from any of them would be reliable. The marvel of technology.

Instead I asked my friend, the one who loves movies so much he runs an office pool for the Oscars. I texted him a simple request: tell me what to watch and I’ll watch it–no questions asked. He did, and my solo movie night was a success.

Oh the marvel of technology.