If you ask me where I am from, I have a hard time answering that. I usually say, “Western Washington state.” My dad was a Free Methodist pastor. During the years I was growing up, a pastor in the Free Methodist Church didn’t usually stay in one place more than about five years. So, from birth to high school graduation I lived in Mount Vernon (WA), Olympia (WA), Spring Arbor (MI), Lynnwood (WA), and Stanwood (WA).
I have two children, each of whom have three children, and my son and wife have adopted another young man. So, we have 7 grandchildren ranging in ages from around 7 to 17. Each one is a unique and amazing person, growing and developing. It is a great joy of my life to watch them.
I was for many years a professor in various colleges and seminaries. Most recently I spent 25 years at George Fox University teaching Old Testament, Hebrew language, and Spirituality and Creation to seminary students.
I stopped classroom teaching in 2019 and work full-time now with a group of scholars around the world on the history of the Bible in Ethiopia. We are supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. If you would like to read a bit more about the work we are doing in that project, follow this link to read an article in The Ancient Near East Today.
Biblical manuscripts in the old language of Ge’ez are quite amazing, but they are also endangered. Since 2005 I have run a project called the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project (EMIP) where we have digitized over 12,000 manuscripts of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition. Every so often I have come across a manuscript that should not have come out of Ethiopia and have worked to see it returned. Here is a link to one such report of the return of the personal Psalter of Emperor Menilek of Ethiopia.
And here is a link to an article about another manuscript that we discovered at Howard University and which was returned to Ethiopia.
One of my jobs is to upload all the images of manuscripts that I have taken to a website (https://betamasaheft.eu/) in the University of Hamburg, Germany, and load metadata about the manuscripts alongside the images. This is a huge job, but in this way the cultural heritage of Ethiopia can be made available to the whole world.
I was a music major in college. Working with the worship team here at Christchurch has been a joy for over twenty years now! I also play bass in a rock and roll band with some other friends. Music recording and producing is a great passion for me these days and brings a lot of joy.
Beth Habecker and I met at Christchurch back in 1999 and were married there in 2000. Our life together has always been bound up with the church. And we enjoy the contemplation of God’s two books, Creation and Scripture. Science and faith are not at war with one another. We love exploring God’s creation. Beth goes down about 9 orders of magnitude below us--just two or three orders of magnitude above an atom—to do her work with the sympathetic nervous system in the heart. My passion in astronomy and cosmology takes me upward to the big part of creation, twelve to twenty orders of magnitude “over our heads.” I am closely watching the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope. This summer we will see a lot of cool images. If you’re interested in this stuff follow this link.
Beth and I are thinking about a trip to the Galapagos Islands in the coming year. God has an especially interesting chapter in his book of creation on that place.
Psalm 8 has, for some years now, been at the top of my list of favorite bible passages:
1 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
2
Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals[a] that you care for them?
5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,[b]
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9 O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
