My thoughts, prayers, and work, my sadness and hope, are with people in Haiti today. I’ll be there all next week. A few links while reflecting on the earthquake and the two years since:

1. Today I did a “two years later” interview on Patheos that is here.

2. This prayer I wrote for the Washington Post a year ago, and I think it’s still my prayer: here.

3. Check out our two year updates on our Haiti Partners work here. My friend and colleague John doing a great 2-minute video report.

4. Also as a kind of prayer/psalm, you could watch this 2-minute After Shock video either over on the right side of this page or here.

5. Read the Spirit is rerunning an interview I’d done with them. Was a good conversation: here.

6. I’m on Miami’s PBS TV station for a panel discussion today. Will add a link when it airs and is online.

Just wrote a blog for InterVarsity looking back on their Urbana conference, which I attended with two friends from Haiti just two weeks before the earthquake two years ago. (A theme of twos in that previous sentence.) Thinking back on that event, what has happened since, and what is ahead. You can read it here: Just Before the Earth Shook.

(Wrote this for InterVarsity’s blog.) I’ve never donned a beard or red suit for Christmas. So far that’s my personal line. But something happens when you have kids. Categories of cool, kitsch, hip, tacky, etc., no longer matter much. It’s a short distance from this to mowing the lawn wearing black dress tube socks with sandals while wearing a Santa hat (I live in Florida; this is possible), but mostly the shift is a good, liberating change. Why? Because you’re freed from caring what others think of you, and even a bit from what you think of you, into concentrating [...]

My daughter attended her first day of kindergarten today. A poignant milestone dressed up in an exceptionally cute plaid jumper. My wife and I thought we were pretty cool with it. Our daughter had attended preschool, after all, so this wasn’t a major logistical change. She was excited as we dropped her off, said goodbye with a smile over her shoulder, then back to drawing in her new notebook. We still thought we were cool with it after we signed up for PTA at the courtyard table. We ran into the local rabbi. My wife is pastor at a Lutheran [...]

Just read Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends with my five-year-old daughter. Somehow I’d never read his poems before, not as a kid or adult. What a delight. Look forward to reading more with my kids (though I did skip a poem now and then). I’m a few decades late to the party, but glad to arrive. When we finished, my daughter and I decided to write a poem in tribute to, in gratitude for, in attempt to be in the tradition of, Silverstein:   The Itchy Scratchy Girl   There was a girl with an itch on her nose, [...]