jskogerboe.com :: one thing

Certain stories in our family have a way of finding new legs year after year at our family gatherings.  One such story has its roots in my parents’ small farm town upbringing in the upper northwestern corner of Minnesota, where the North Dakota plains have invaded the landscape, and families earn their bread in the  rich [...]

p It was like a bomb hit my office.  Both scary and exhilarating. And I know that those of you who visited my office 15 years ago at Emmaus Lutheran Church are certain I’m talking about my decorating style, what with my, um… free-form approach to filing sheet music and whatnot. But that’s not it [...]

October 30, 2011. Living Hope Church in St. Michael-Albertville, MN.  Sunday night service.  This message is taken from Isaiah 43:1-7. It’s a message to Christ followers who are going through extremely difficult circumstances… times the old testament writers would refer to in poetic, idiomatic language… “going through water and fire.” In these desperate times, Isaiah 43 brings [...]

I’m pausing briefly in my series on the pursuit of joy (check out part one, two, and three) to make this important announcement: Seth is out of the family.  Man, I loved that kid, too.  It will be hard to lose him, sure, but he did, after all, leave the dishes half finished.  Levi is [...]

I always want to be a better dad.  When I finally achieve “best dad of all time” staus, I’ll still want to be a better dad.  Today’s post is meant to inspire us dads to be intentional in our dadliness. My friend Carlos Whittaker (known in the Twittersphere as @loswhit, father of viral video star [...]

  I’m wildly in love with my wife.  She’s smart, she’s quick-witted, she’s beautiful, she loves Jesus, she’s a great mom, she is discerning, she’s wise, she really loves people, she’s beautiful, she cherishes relationships, she’s not satisfied with “fine” or good enough,” she loves our kids intentionally, she’s beautiful… I can literally do this [...]

You know what drives me nuts?  I mean just frothy lipped, make-it-stop, face twitching crazy? Carly Simon’s 1972 hit, “You’re so Vain.” Yes.  I recognize it has been thirty years.  What’s that you say?  Let it go? I can’t go for that. No how. No can do. Lo, these thirty years later I am still [...]

  Now we’re getting at the heart of it.  The heart of ALL of it.  This is what I believe to be true of God in the deepest corners of my heart.  Scripture screams it out.  My life rings with it.  This is what I believe. God wants us to passionately pursue JOY. What?  Wait… the church [...]

When I think of parsing the world into categories, I remember the words of Bob Wiley: “There are two types of people in this world: those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t.” Here I nod my head in affirmation.  Hard to be on the fence about Neil Diamond. But there is a deeper [...]

  Sure I was a little overweight.  That’s my point. That being said, AWANA shouldn’t have tried so hard to break me.  I was only 10.  I wasn’t cut out for this. We did some cool stuff, for sure.  There was the day we broke the world’s record for the longest banana split, laid out [...]