Author: David Tyra

Every Tuesday morning at ten o’clock my Dad meets with some friends from church for a late breakfast. They politely take over one corner of their local Bob Evans restaurant and spend the next two hours talking together. There are a lot of smiles and a lot of laughter. Sometimes, there are even some quiet tears. The food is important, but it is definitely secondary to the conversation and interactions these Christian friends have together.

Sometimes I am priveleged to join them. I go with my Dad and he always buys my breakfast, no matter how many times I offer to buy his. They usually have me sit next to or across from a wonderful retired pastor who is part of their group. His name is Glen Lockwood. He is the former pastor of Grey Road Baptist Church in Indianapolis, where this entire group attends. Pastor Lockwood has for many years been something of a mentor to me, and talking with him is like getting a personal pastoral seminar along with my breakfast.Read More

On a recent Saturday, I was watching my grandson. I had a wedding to do that evening, so I was in the bathroom shaving, while Andrew drew pictures in the dining room. Then I heard: knock-knock-knock-knock!

I said: “Andrew, was that you making that noise?” He said, “No!” Then I heard him run for the front door. I ran after him, wiping shaving cream and water from my face. He was already at the door. “Don’t open that door!”, I said. He looked back at me and said, “I’m trying to help you!”

At our house, most people we know come to our back door. When someone knocks on the front door, it’s usually salesmen, politicians, or the occasional non-Christian cult member. So I really didn’t want my grandson to open the door before I got there.

Wiping my face and hands one last time, I squeezed between my grandson and the door, and opened it to see a young man in a t-shirt, shorts and a ball cap, standing on my porch. I opened the storm door a little—with Andrew trying to push past me to see who it was – and I said, “Can I help you?”Read More

I know you all groaned inwardly when I told you I took over 1500 pictures while I was in the Holy Land. I promised not to make you look at all of them, but to my surprise, you willingly looked at a great many. When I showed some of the pictures in the evening service that first time, I honestly thought you would quickly get bored with them. I remember my grandparents coming home from vacation and showing us an interminable number of slides from their trip. It was all quite boring to me as a kid, and I had no desire to bore any of you in the same way.

But you weren’t bored. The Holy Land is different, isn’t it?

For my part, I’m glad I took all those pictures. I knew this would happen, but I’m still not happy about it: we went so many places, and saw so many different things, some of the details have started to blend together in my mind. I sat and talked with my son Josh the other day, and he reminded me of some things I’d forgotten about our trip. At least, I forgot them until he spoke of them. So I went back through my pictures (and even through some of the 2000 pictures Josh took), and it helped to refresh my memory.Read More

So many people have come up to me and said, “I am so glad you got back safe from Israel! I was praying that you would be safe!” Both members of our church, and people outside of our congregation have expressed this to me.

I am grateful for each of you. I am surprised at how many people outside of our church knew about my trip. And I am humbled by the concern of so many. My response was and is always the same: “Thank you for praying. I’m glad we got back safe and sound, too.”

Many of you know that tensions were on the rise while our study group was in Israel, particularly after the kidnapping of those three Jewish teenage boys. While we were there, the Israeli Defense Force was conducting a massive nation-wide, house-to-house search for them. It was not learned until after we got back that those boys had been murdered almost right away. Our hearts were broken along with the Israeli people.Read More

I’ve always wanted to go.

I always intended to go someday.

I have desired it with an intensity that I can’t really put into words.

I’ve even cried, listening to other people talking about their trips…but somehow, I’ve never been able to go myself.

Until now.

Five years ago, to my great surprise, the church gave me a 5-week sabbatical, not to include any of my vacation time. It was also to repeat every five years. It was an incredibly generous gift, and frankly, I didn’t quite know what to do with it the first time. A sabbatical should be used to do something special, something designed to recharge your spiritual batteries and renew your soul. Back in February, I raised the possibility with our deacons of postponing this second sabbatical ‘til next year, because I didn’t want to waste it, and I still didn’t know exactly what to do with the time.

But all that changed almost overnight.Read More

On a recent Tuesday morning I drove to the church and walked in, ready to begin the week’s tasks. Ordinarily, after checking in with the secretary to see if anything needs my attention, I go right to my desk, unload my briefcase and open my Bible.

On this particular day, though, I stopped to talk with our cashiers. Then I talked with some ladies who had come in to finish painting one of our hallways. Then one of my colleagues in the ministry stopped by, and we talked for a while. After that conversation, I had a message to call someone; when I returned the call, I had a happy talk with the folks on the other end. In fact, all of these conversations were happy ones that left me feeling charged up and encouraged. (You can’t say that about every conversation.)

As I prepared to leave for lunch, I told our secretary, “It’s been a good morning, but it hasn’t gone anything like what I’d expected. I’m gonna go eat lunch, then come back and take another crack at it.” (She was glad to hear me say that, because I was supposed to have been writing an article for her to put in the next newsletter…this article, in fact. Never antagonize a church secretary who needs an article.)Read More

Not long ago a friend of mine emailed me an article titled I Don’t Worship God by Singing: I Connect With Him Elsewhere. My friend even said something to the effect that he thought we should stop singing in church. I’m not sure what his motivation was; frankly, I haven’t raised the subject with him, and I’m not sure I will.

The article was written by a man named Donald Miller. It was actually a “blog” (short for “web log”, if you didn’t know). It seems that lots of people have blogs these days. Apparently they feel that the world has an urgent need to know what they think about every little thing, or a compelling interest in every little thing they do. The motto for bloggers seems to be: “I believe everybody is entitled to my opinion.” We’re going to have to change the old saying to: “Blogs are like belly buttons: everybody’s got one.”

Anyway, in his blog, Mr. Miller went on at length about how during a recent worship service he attended, in his words: “I wasn’t feeling much of anything.” (And that, after all, is the purpose of church, right? To make us feel something? Or is that the movies? I get confused, listening to people these days.)Read More

It’s been an unusual start to the new year, here at First Baptist Church.

We started off by having to cancel our first services of the year, due to a bitterly cold winter storm being predicted. The Greene County Emergency Management Agency asked that all organizations, including churches, suspend their activities for that Sunday, January 5th. After conferring with one of our Trustees and our Chairman of Deacons, we decided it was probably good citizenship (and submission to a reasonable request from proper authorities; see Romans 13:1)to do as they asked.

So: no church on the first Sunday of the year! My wife said to me that afternoon: “This is kind of a strange parenthesis in our lives.” She was right.

For a couple of days after that, the church building felt like a ghost town. The State Police were still requesting people to limit unnecessary travel, so there were very few folks about. My footprints were the only ones leading up to and away from the church for two days. I normally like being at the church by myself (I can get a lot of things done), but this just felt eerily quiet. Too quiet.Read More