You don’t have to work very hard to find bad news. Check the headlines for five minutes and you’ll probably come away knowing about a war, a political fight, a natural disaster, and at least one person who made a very questionable decision.
Some days it feels like that’s all there is.
It isn’t. People are helping each other. Churches are serving their towns. Strange little moments happen that make people laugh. And every once in a while, something happens that leaves folks wondering exactly what to make of it.
So I went looking through recent headlines for those kinds of stories, especially ones connected to Christianity and the Church.
I found quite a few.
Some are funny. Some are encouraging. A couple are a little strange.
Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty good description of church life in general.
A Dog Joins the Prayer
One of my favorites comes from a Catholic parish in Villavicencio, Colombia.
Father Carlos Mario Peña Lopera has two rescued dogs, Simón and Luna, who spend most of their time with him at church. They’re regulars at worship. They’ve even been known to howl along with the music.
Recently, a woman sat in the church while several people gathered around her to pray. Hands were placed on her shoulders. Simón was sitting in a chair right beside her.
And Simón decided he had a part to play.
He reached out his paw toward the priest.
The priest took it and kept praying.
Somebody caught it on video, and it went around the internet in a hurry. Watch it, and you’ll see what everybody else saw: a dog who noticed everyone joining in and figured he should too.
What was going through his head? No idea. But his timing was excellent.
He sat quietly, paid attention, and joined the prayer.
Risk or Rust
Justin Buzzard is 47. He’s a pastor, a husband, a father of three, and a full-time worker.
That wasn’t enough to keep him busy.
Buzzard recently joined the football team at San Jose City College in California. He’d played when he was younger, including one season in college before injuries ended it.
Then his oldest son showed him a story about a man in his 60s who went back to college to play football. His son asked, “Why don’t you do that?”
Buzzard laughed.
Not for long, though. He contacted the coaches, showed up, worked out, and made the team. Some of the younger players assumed he was somebody’s dad who’d come to watch practice.
Instead, he started putting on pads with them.
He wears number 48, the age he turns this month. His teammates call him “O.G.”
Buzzard actually played.
Late in the season opener, he went in on defense and helped set up a sack of the quarterback. After nearly 30 years away from college football, he was back in a real game.
He has a simple phrase for why he did it: “risk or rust.”
There was something he still wanted to try, so he tried it.
Before anybody emails me, no, I’m not trying out for anything. But I like his phrase a lot.
Fire in Ferris
Down in Ferris, Texas, on August 27, Pastor Tyler Poole watched a brush fire move toward Patrick Baptist Church.
The church sits south of Dallas, and the parsonage where Poole lives is on the same property. Strong winds pushed a fast-moving fire toward both the church and the house.
A church member spotted the flames and raised the alarm. Everybody there got out while firefighters moved in.
For a while it looked bad.
The fire burned across the church property. Flames surrounded a propane tank, which is the sentence you never want to read about your own church. A tree caught fire only inches from the parsonage.
Poole said later he thought they were going to lose the house.
They didn’t.
The church buildings survived, and nobody was hurt.
Poole called it the “hand of God.” He also made a point of thanking the firefighters who stopped it before it could do more damage.
Big Paws to Fill
A little closer to home, a church near Upper Arlington just welcomed a new member of its ministry team.
Her name is Love.
She’s also a Golden Retriever.
Atonement Lutheran Church commissioned Love on August 23 as part of Lutheran Church Charities’ K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry. Love and her handlers will visit people dealing with grief, loneliness, crisis, and other hard stretches.
The church has done this before. Their previous comfort dog, Rosie, served about ten years before she died in 2024. In that time Rosie made more than 2,400 visits and met more than 30,000 people.
So this is a real ministry, and Love has some pretty big paws to fill.
Five other comfort dogs came to Atonement for the commissioning, which meant six Golden Retrievers gathered near the altar during the children’s message.
One of the kids asked how Love compared with Rosie.
A team member said Rosie had been calmer.
Love, apparently, is still learning.
What the Fire Missed
In Johannesburg, South Africa, members of the New Apostolic Church lost their Towerby church building to a fire on August 25.
The damage was extensive, and the building was condemned. Nobody was hurt. Investigators are still working out what started it.
Afterward, members went back inside to see what was left.
Most of it was gone.
But in a small room where they kept the Bibles and Communion supplies, they found something they didn’t expect.
The Bibles were still there.
So were the Communion chalices.
The church said the fire hadn’t touched them.
Members called it a miracle. Maybe there’s a simple explanation for why that room was spared. Maybe there isn’t.
For now they’re worshiping in other church buildings while leaders figure out what comes next.
A Verse Wrapped in Gold
About 1,500 years ago, someone in what’s now central Turkey placed a very thin sheet of gold inside a small copper case.
Archaeologists recently found it at Türkmen Karahöyük, an ancient settlement in Turkey.
It’s a Christian amulet. An amulet is a small object people carried because they believed it could protect them.
Researchers date this one to the fourth or fifth century. The gold inside the case is about as thick as a sheet of paper. Archaeologist Michele Rüzgar Massa says the writing on it is most likely a passage from the Bible, though nobody has figured out which passage yet.
They also think the amulet may have belonged to a child.
About 1,500 years ago, a child may have carried a tiny piece of gold containing words from the Bible.
We still don’t know which words.
There is plenty in this world that is hard, frightening, and discouraging. There is also plenty of evidence that God is still at work.
Sometimes we just have to go looking for it.
Blessings,
Pastor Rick
