Sophia Grace talks about him every day. Daddy wasn’t great at braiding her hair, she recently said to her mother, but he tried his best. She tells people he’s in heaven now.

The rest of the family talks about Bryan Cooke all the time, too.

On his cellphone, Mike Cooke found a voicemail his son had left him in October. He didn’t listen to it before his son’s death, and he still hasn’t. The message — to hear his son call him “Pops” again — is a gift he anticipates opening.

Lynda Cooke also saved a voicemail from her son. She plays it over and over, memorizing his laughter. She prefers to hear his voice when she can slip out alone to the dock behind their home.

The Matipan Avenue residence the Cookes were working on is now home to Alecia Wright, 47, who lives with her sister and disabled mother. Their lives are peaceful, but they feel for the Cooke family.

With the shooting in mind, Wright hung a sign with a cross on the front door that reads: “Bless our home and all who enter.”

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Mike Cooke was shot and his son was killed during a robbery attempt as they fixed up a home for a family in need. Now Mike is working on forgiveness. "If you cannot find hope, then you remain inside of that tragedy, and it imprisons you." His story: https://t.co/hMwDGZNlEr

— Angie Jackson (@AngieJackson23) April 20, 2018

There’s a difference in preaching and teaching. Certainly, preaching contains teaching, however preaching is more – at least it should be. The goal of preaching is the transformation of lives. I once heard someone say that “preaching goes for the guts.” I liked that and often have that in the back of my mind when preparing sermons. Please don’t be offended if you are a teacher. Teaching is essential and as I just wrote, preaching must contain teaching. It’s just that preaching takes good teaching and adds to it the “so what” that will turn the transfer of information into the transformation of life.

Changed lives is what we are preaching for, right? It’s not about impressing people with our speaking ability or intelligence. It’s not about passing on head knowledge about the Bible. It’s about transforming lives for Jesus Christ. Right? Pews full of people who only know about Jesus won’t be the missional disciples that North America desperately needs. We need pews full of people who intimately know Jesus and are daily being changed into his likeness – people who are living as Jesus would in the world around them. In our pulpits we must be preaching for a change. A change of life. A change into mature, missional disciples of Christ.

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The world’s first female Anglican Archbishop, Kay Goldsworthy, has started a tour of regional Western Australia, visiting country parishes across the Perth Diocese stretching across the Wheatbelt to the eastern Goldfields and to Esperance in the south east.

In Kay Goldsworthy’s first meeting with country church clergy since her installation as the eighth Anglican Archbishop of Perth in February, she addressed the faithful at the ninth Rural gathering in Wongan Hills in the Wheatbelt.

“The schools and agencies that are related to the Anglican Church, across Perth and the country as my very first ministry, to hear how it is for people, what they are doing, what they believe God has called them to, and what their hopes and dreams are in the church going forward.”

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World's first female Anglican Archbishop calls on Anglicans to keep the faith amid rural church closureshttps://t.co/xl2uG0DSpX pic.twitter.com/HHk6Q7L0r5

— ABC Perth (@abcperth) April 20, 2018

Before more than 1,000 people, including four former presidents, at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, speakers lauded Mrs. Bush as a loving but steel-tough “enforcer” who steered a powerful family through trying times. She was the second woman in U.S. history to be the wife of one president and the mother of another.

“She called her style a benevolent dictatorship, but honestly, it wasn’t always benevolent,” her son Jeb Bush recalled. “There were no safe spaces or microaggressions allowed with Barbara Pierce Bush.”

Many also made note of her quick, sometimes biting, wit—a central characteristic that helped her resonate with everyday people across the political spectrum.

“She was the first lady of the greatest generation,” historian Jon Meacham said at the funeral, comparing her to Abigail Adams, the wife of America’s second president, John Adams, and mother of its sixth president, John Quincy Adams. Mr. Meacham wrote a book about President George H.W. Bush, to whom Mrs. Bush was married for 73 years.

Mrs. Bush died Tuesday at her home at age 92 with her husband at her side. Two days earlier, a family spokesman said in a statement that she was in failing health and had declined continued medical treatment to focus on “comfort care.”

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Almighty God, who didst raise up thy servant Anselm to teach the Church of his day to understand its faith in thine eternal Being, perfect justice, and saving mercy: Provide thy Church in every age with devout and learned scholars and teachers, that we may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

On Saturday April 21, the universal Church celebrates the Feast of Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Saint Anselm, of course, is the patron of our Abbey and College. Please join us on Saturday for our celebration at 11:50 a.m. #monklife #saintanselm @SaintAnselm pic.twitter.com/KtKEc3XztZ

— Saint Anselm Abbey (@AnselmAbbey) April 18, 2018

Almighty God, Whose only-begotten Son, as at this time, did burst the bonds of death, because it was not possible that He should be holden of it, raise us, we pray Thee, from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness, that, at the last day, when He shall come again in glory, we may be quickened in our mortal bodies, through the same Spirit that quickened Him, who was the first-born from the dead, and is now alive f0r evermore; in whose name we beseech Thee to hear us, O merciful and gracious Lord.

–Henry Stobart, Daily Services For Christian Households (London:SPCK, 1867), p. 110

He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel which you heard, which has been preached to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

–Colossians 1:15-23