RISK or RUST
📍Silicon Valley Pastor & Author
🏈 6’3” 215 48 years young
👇I help men play big
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Articles by Justin Buzzard
47-year-old pastor makes college football team as DE Original
College football is currently experiencing an influx of experienced players coming back to the sport from the NFL. The sport’s been rocked in recent weeks with high-profile coaches complaining about the leniency of players returning to college fields this fall. However, Justin Buzzard is making his own waves on social media after revealing his intentions of playing college football as a 47-year-old pastor.
The Last Drive
The father gripped the steering wheel with both hands as the highway stretched ahead. Rain tapped steadily against the windshield. In the passenger seat his son sat quietly staring out at the blurred fields. This was the final drive they would take together for a long time. Tomorrow the son would board a plane for basic training. Neither of them had spoken much since leaving the house. The father kept thinking about all the things he had not said over the years. The missed times because of work.
The Garden
The woman knelt in the dirt pulling weeds from around the tomato plants. The sun warmed her back as she worked. Her hands moved with practiced care the same way they had for thirty seven years in this same backyard. Her husband used to help her here. He would complain about his knees the whole time but he always came out with two glasses of lemonade and stayed until the work was done. Now the second glass sat untouched on the small table beside the shed.
The Last Light in the Arcade
The arcade smelled like popcorn. He fed his last token into the game, the old racing cabinet that had been sucking quarters since before he was born. He was thirty-two now, and the place was supposed to close forever tonight. One final night of glowing relics before the wrecking ball turned it into another storage unit complex. He gripped the wheel. The game’s engine roared through cheap speakers.
The Weight of Empty Chairs
The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and yesterday’s coffee. He sat at the head of the table, staring at the four empty chairs that used to hold his entire world. Morning light cut through the blinds in dusty blades, illuminating the faint fingerprints still smudged on the wooden backs, small ones from his wife, sticky ones from the twins, and the careful, almost invisible marks from his sixteen-year-old son, who had tried so hard to act like he didn’t care anymore.
Saltwater
He put the boat in at five in the morning, same as always. His son had loved this part. He used to stand at the stern and watch the wake close up behind them as they moved out from the dock, as if he were memorizing the way the town looked from out here. He had not understood what he was memorizing or why. He understood it better now. It had been fourteen months. Long enough that people had stopped asking how he was doing, which was its own kind of answer.
The Confession Booth
The father had been hearing confessions for twenty-two years and had learned to hold them loosely. You took in what people offered, you offered back what you could, and you let the weight of it pass through you rather than settle. It was the only way to stay standing. He heard twelve confessions in the afternoon before it happened. Petty things, most of them. One woman who’d been mean to her sister-in-law at Christmas and felt guilty about it still.
The Last Cartographer
She’d been making maps since she was nine years old. She started with the rooms of her grandmother's house, measuring each one with a length of string and a ruler borrowed from the kitchen drawer. The proportions were wrong, and the hallway bent where it shouldn't have, but her grandmother kept it pinned to the wall in the parlor until the day she died. Now she was forty-three and her maps were perfect.
Ping
She’d been on the station for two years and four months when the signal came through. The station sat at a point of a planet no one had bothered to name yet. There was nothing out here except the listening arrays and the six people who ran them, and most of what the arrays listened to was debris. Micrometeors. Thermal expansion in the superstructure. The low hum of the planet below them, which she had long since stopped hearing as anything separate from silence.
Return Address
The first letter arrived on a cold day in February with his own handwriting on the envelope and no return address. He opened it assuming it was something he'd mailed to himself and forgotten, the kind of thing he did sometimes, a reminder or a document. Instead, it was two paragraphs. Don't take the contract. I know it looks clean. It isn't. The client's name will be in the news by July and you don't want to be attached to it. Call your brother. Not for any reason you can think of. Just call him.
Night Shift
He had been a night nurse for eight years and he prided himself on his memory for faces. It was practically useful, more useful than people realized. In a busy emergency department at two in the morning, when things moved fast and the light was hard and everyone was tired and some of the patients were not in a state to give clear information about themselves, a good memory was a clinical tool. He knew who had been through before. He knew the regulars and their histories.
Collecting Last Words
She had worked in palliative care for nineteen years and she wrote everything down. Not the clinical stuff. That went in the charts. She wrote the other things. The last words, the last jokes, the last requests. A woman who asked for a window opened because she wanted to hear rain one more time. A man who spent his final hour trying to remember the name of a dog he'd owned when he was seven. A yellow dog, he kept saying.
The Log Entry
He had worked the lighthouse for eleven years and he knew every vessel on the local registry. Fishing boats, survey craft, and the coast guard tender that came through weekly. He knew their lights, their silhouettes and the sounds their engines made in fog. He knew them the way you know things when your whole job is watching and your world is water. The ship he saw in March was not on the registry. It was large, running dark, moving at a speed that the conditions shouldn't have allowed.
The Tell
She was eight years old when she realized not everyone could see it. She thought of it as a shimmer, though that wasn't quite right. It was more like the air around a person went slightly wrong when they said something that wasn't true. A wobble. A brief doubling of the space behind their eyes. She mentioned it to her mother once and her mother looked at her the way adults looked at children who said things that made them uncomfortable, and after that she kept it to herself.
Master Key
She had been a locksmith for twenty years and she could open anything given enough time. She found the key in a box of estate hardware she bought at auction, a lot of two hundred miscellaneous pieces. Old skeleton keys, padlock keys, car keys from the eighties, a few she couldn't identify at all. She sorted through them over an evening and set aside anything interesting, and the key she found at the bottom of the box was interesting.
Breaking Down Jesus’s Farewell Discourse
Jesus’s Farewell Discourse (John 13–17) The nineteenth century Anglican bishop J. C. Ryle once approvingly quoted an old divine who said, writing of Jesus’s upper room discourse (John 13–16) followed by his high priestly prayer (John 17), that “the best and fullest sermon ever preached was followed by the best of prayers.” That’s high praise, and many others have agreed. For 2,000 years, Jesus’s words to his followers and to his Father have strengthened and encouraged Christians.
Taking Life Seriously
Introduction A lot of things happened in 1973. I was a teenager with a face filled with acne and an appetite for adventure. Beth was a cute ten-year-old dreaming of her Prince Charming from the Dairy State. Notre Dame topped the college football rankings with a perfect 11-0 season. The Sting took home the Oscar for best picture and The Walton’s swept five Emmy categories. The price of gas was 40 cents, minimum wage was $1.60, and a first-class stamp cost eight cents.
33 Ideas for Dating Your Wife
Invest in Your Marriage through Dating Men, you need to come up with your own ideas for how to date your wife. You know your wife better than anyone else. Only you know how to best cultivate and guard the woman God has given you. But sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own. Here are some ideas to jump-start your own thinking. My prayer is that the power of the gospel would drive how you date your wife and implement these ideas.
What Did John Mean When He Called Jesus the “Word”? (John 1)
This article is part of the Tough Passages series. Listen to the Passage Read the Passage 1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
How Does Jesus Respond When We Doubt? (John 20)
This article is part of the Tough Passages series. Listen to the Passage Read the Passage 24Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” 26Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them.
Dream Big about Your Marriage
Cast a Vision Husbands should be big dreamers. Men, you should have a bigger dream for your marriage than your wife has for your marriage. You are the leader of your marriage. And men, you should have a bigger dream for your marriage than you have for your work or any other responsibility or interest in your life.
Say It In A Sentence
One Thursday afternoon I went for a walk with my pastor. He asked me what my sermon was about for later that night. Four minutes into trying to explain what my sermon was about, my pastor interrupted me and said: “SAY IT IN A SENTENCE!” When I was 21, I started preaching once a month at The Santa Barbara Rescue Mission. I didn’t know how to preach and I wanted to learn (I preached my first sermon at age 16 without a clue of what I was doing).
20 Ideas for Dating Your Wife
By Justin Buzzard, Crosswalk.com This post is adapted from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard. It originally appeared on Crossway.org; used with permission. Pursue Your Wife Thoughtfully Men, you need to come up with your own ideas for how to date your wife. You know your wife better than anyone else. Only you know how to best care for the woman God has given you. But, sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own. Look these ideas over.
20 Ideas for Dating Your Wife
Justin Buzzard Pastor, Garden City Church 2017 7 Jun This post is adapted from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard. It originally appeared on Crossway.org; used with permission. Pursue Your Wife Thoughtfully Men, you need to come up with your own ideas for how to date your wife. You know your wife better than anyone else. Only you know how to best care for the woman God has given you. But, sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own. Look these ideas over.
20 Ideas for Dating Your Wife
By Justin Buzzard, Crosswalk.com This post is adapted from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard. It originally appeared on Crossway.org; used with permission. Pursue Your Wife Thoughtfully Men, you need to come up with your own ideas for how to date your wife. You know your wife better than anyone else. Only you know how to best care for the woman God has given you. But, sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own. Look these ideas over.
20 Ideas for Dating Your Wife
This post is adapted from Date Your Wife by Justin Buzzard. It originally appeared on Crossway.org; used with permission. Pursue Your Wife Thoughtfully Men, you need to come up with your own ideas for how to date your wife. You know your wife better than anyone else. Only you know how to best care for the woman God has given you. But, sometimes it helps to build off other people’s ideas in order to form your own. Look these ideas over.
The Father Heart of God
Do you remember the pig craze of the 1980s? People shelled out thousands of dollars to own one of these exotic house pets imported from Vietnam. Their breeders claimed these were quite smart and would grow to a weight of only forty pounds. Well, they were half right. The pigs were smart. They could be trained to walk using leashes, do tricks, and use a litter box. But they had a tendency to grow to about 150 pounds and could become quite aggressive. What do people do with an unwanted pig?
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