Pour Over is a collection of a few items that I’ve read, heard, or watched this week that I’ve found challenging, insightful, or compelling—to be pored over perhaps with a nice cup of pour-over (or other preferred beverage). Hope you enjoy.

Don’t Resent God’s Training Ground

After years of bouncing from thing to thing, I thought that I’d found my calling. I was working for a church, and I loved my work. I’d taken a year-long ministry training course in Seattle. I was planning to go to seminary and to become a pastor. Then I lost my job.

Through one of the elders at the church, God provided a good job right away in a new field outside of church ministry, a job that I have still today. My family is provided for, thank God. But here I am again doing something new and unfamiliar, unsure of my calling.

In this essay at Desiring God, Kaitlin Miller reminds us that God uses all of our experiences for our good and to his glory, even—or maybe especially—the ones that make no sense at the time. This is a piece I will come back to again and again.

Wendell Berry on How to Be a Poet and a Complete Human Being

Be sure to listen to Berry read his poem “How to Be a Poet,” and sit with it a minute.

Dave Matthews Addresses New Citizens at Monticello on July 4, 2013

Whether you are for or against the refugee ban, we ought to all start from the same place: the principle of E Pluribus Unum. We are all immigrants, one way or another. Matthews is quirky, funny, and sincere—a lovely, American speech.