Author: Jon Gauger

Gizmos and gadgets. You'll see a ton of them if you go camping. Over Memorial Day, I couldn't help but notice the massive amounts of stuff people trotted out to their campsites. There were all kinds of ingenious quick-shade gizmos.  Few who lugged them out and set them up could resist the urge to hang from them cute little lights of various themes.. Then there were more traditional dining canopies—their netted walls and zippered doors defying the most eager of flies a share in a meal in the great outdoors. I saw all kinds of cooking implements.  Things for which…

Time capsules—we've all seen these eclectic collections stuffed into cornerstones of new buildings in an attempt to give future generations a cultural snapshot of a previous era.  My wife and I discovered that we actually own a time capsule—our pop-up camper, also known as a tent trailer.  For the uninitiated, it's a metal box with a roof that cranks up, revealing canvas sides and a set of beds on each end.   It's like a tent—only much nicer. But more than a decade ago, we upgraded to a hard side trailer known as a fifth wheel.  It's nicer yet.  Thus, for…

Sin. “Everybody” says “nobody” talks about it anymore. So I’m about to. Sin is falling short of God’s perfection, His holy standards.  The Bible teaches that “all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory” (Romans 3:23).   No Christian would argue that “the wages (or results) of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Most of us are comfortable acknowledging the wrongness of sin, its penalty, and the way out of sin God offers through Christ.  But acknowledging our sin in the nitty gritty of life…that’s a different story….

Why do we like our music so loud? Go to a concert—whether rock, pop, country or Christian—and your ears are almost melted off by the end of the evening. Go to most restaurants that are considered “in”….and chances are the music is cranked up so loud that you have to yell to carry on a conversation. Driving an expensive car is not enough to be truly cool.  What you need is a subwoofer that’ll blow out glass.  LOUDNESS.  That’s what makes you cool. And the question, again, is why? Well in the restaurant world, there actually are some answers.  Research…

Have you heard the story of Irena Sendler from World War II? When Hitler took over Irena’s beloved Poland, he set up ghetto camps where Jewish families lived before being crammed into cattle cars and hauled off to concentration camps where most died. But Irena Sendler’s heart was touched by the plight of the Jewish people, especially their young children. She knocked on Jewish doors in the Warsaw ghetto and, in Sendler's own words, "tried to talk the mothers out of their children."   Irena offered an escape from near certain death, offering to take the little ones to Roman Catholic…

Do you and I worship “niceness? I say…quite possibly. As Americans, we prefer nice churches in nice neighborhoods with nice seats in nice auditoriums. Gone the days of squawky P.A. Systems, our churches rumble with the latest and greatest in audio gear.  The sound is…pretty nice.  The job of doing PowerPoint and creating video clips is now the domain of a “Pastor of Visual Arts.”   The stuff on the screen, frankly, looks pretty nice.  Nothing wrong with any of that.  But niceness—as a frame of reference—can go too far.  It comes to a crash up against an old hymn that’s…

Where’s all the music? When I fill in as host for Moody Radio’s morning show, we do a feature called “Breakfast for the Soul.”  Essentially, it’s a brief devotional that I try to follow up with a song that fits the reading.    But I’m often stumped. Example? Where is the chorus that reminds us fasting is the expected behavior of a normal Christian life?  Ever heard a song about the persecuted church?  Or loving people living a homosexual lifestyle?  Good luck finding that kind of stuff. So I’ve taken the liberty of crafting an opening verse or chorus on some…

Crawling across the plywood of our attic, I spied the tan plastic bag and knew exactly what was inside: Daytimers. Before there was Google Calendar and Evernote… Before there were Palm Pilots… Back when Windows referred to the glass in your living room—not an operating system—we needed a way to keep track of our schedules. Many of us in the business world used Daytimers—a spiral bound pocket book with calendars and appointment pages.  And in that tan plastic bag up in my attic were several years’ worth of old Daytimers. You know what caught my eye as I flipped through…

I should have known the pleasant looking cowboy before me was an imposter.  But his gloves, hat and gun all looked legit.  He invited us to a sandpit where we could pan for gold (okay, it was actually pyrite—but it looked like the real deal). I have to confess, it was exhilarating swirling the shallow pan, exposing the yellow glow of gold—just like I'd seen in the movies.  We carefully dumped our gold into miniature cloth sacks, pausing now and then to see what kind of fortunes we'd amassed. I saw “we” because it was me, two young nieces of…

He's back at it again—my buddy Jack.  He's the one that's trying to build bridges with his neighbor across the street.  In a previous blog, I promised to keep you up to date. Here goes. All winter long, Jack has taken his snow blower over to his neighbor's driveway and blown it out.  In return his neighbor—we'll call him Steve—has blown out Jack's driveway.  But the best part is they've had opportunity to work on their driveways together.  Even shoveled side by side.   They wave at each other in their cars—and often chat when getting the mail. Jack and his…