A Guest Blog from my good friend, Pastor Aaron Kunce. 30% of people ask questions of the people around them and are persistently curious about others. They are Illuminators. The other 70% might be perfectly nice people, but they don’t ask questions. They are Diminishers.

Whether we like to wrestle with it or not, each of us will one day breathe our last. Our families will be left to craft a service order for our funeral and names will be assigned to speak about you.

What last word will be spoken about you?

Surely there is some person in York County whose voice is a nuisance to you.

York County has not always been the easiest place to love. Our family’s move to York in 2004 from Raleigh, North Carolina was a bit of a culture shock.

There are a lot of great things to do and places to go that make for a great quality of life and a great place to raise a family. Our family has a number of things we love to do, places to go, and activities we make sure out-of-town guests don’t miss.

The public does not often get to hear the stories of men and women serving as ministers, exemplars of the Christian faith, who make their communities better.

I am not talking about spotless saints, but humble leaders faithfully living out their calling to serve their communities with God’s help.

Each of us needs schools to teach, hospitals to heal, police to protect and serve, government to order civic life, and places of worship to lift our hearts to a higher purpose.

A 2001 Gallup survey reported that 25% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans believed that crime had gone up in their neighborhood over the last year. 20 years later, in 2022, those numbers have shot up to 42% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans reporting they are more fearful of crime.

One thing we learn from the farmer is that today’s fruit tells us about yesterday’s seed. What kind of seed have we been sowing in the fields called family and community?

2022 is going out with a bang in the Anderson household, or rather, with a thud and a crack! My sweet, 16-year-old daughter, Amelia, took a hard spill at the rollerskating rink that fractured her left wrist.

I had intended on writing a reflection piece about 2022. I never realized that a 10-hour stint in the ER would provide inspiration.

“Help me understand” is the kind of slow, gentle, loving language that has the power to take your relationships from where they are today to something far more rewarding and fulfilling tomorrow.

From the People You Should Know podcast: If we are honest, getting to know complete strangers can be scary. In our debut episode, we had the honor of talking with the CEO of Logos Academy and Logos Works, Aaron Anderson. He talks about networking in this episode and how if he could give people one thing it would be the ability to network and get to know people.

Go ahead and cancel me for maintaining these friendships with my neighbors. These are people God has called me to love without exceptions or excuses.

Sorry. I'm not canceling my neighbor.

Most of us feel embarrassed or ashamed of being lonely because it feels like personal inadequacy or deficiency. What if there is a darkness behind what drives us to loneliness?

The world as we have known it for the last 18 months has been a challenge in which to find a rhythm. Our old ways of doing things have been flipped upside down.

Work, school, and church life were moved to different rhythms.

Where do we turn in our grief to find comfort in the unexplainable losses we endure in life?

There are two titles by CS Lewis that I have commended frequently as a pastor to people journeying through the valley of the shadow of death: A Grief Observed and The Great Divorce.