Our home library includes some “Where’s Waldo” children’s books which feature a lanky, bespectacled young man in a red and white shirt, hidden in detailed drawings with scores of other people and objects. The reader must find Waldo on the incredibly busy double-page spread. It’s sometimes tricky, because the illustrator has dressed other people in similar clothes, …
One evening for dessert, I decided I’d “be good” and lower my sugar intake by diluting my ice cream. Reasoning they were both dairy products, I mixed plain yogurt with my butter pecan ice cream. Before you rush to your fridge, be forewarned—it tasted awful! The tartness of the yogurt and the sweetness of the ice …
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to worry? I don’t even watch the news (a virtual fear factory), and yet just going through life gives opportunity after opportunity for me to get caught up in anxious thoughts. Jesus recognized this challenge and invites, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, …
Recently we decided to visit a new automatic car wash. What a cool machine! We drove up to their conveyor, shifted into neutral, then just sat in the car as it pulled us through. After powerful streams of soapy water, we passed through a forest of suspended scrubbing strips, followed by a final rinse and a blow dry …
When I was a boy living in the panhandle of Florida, my family visited our little beachfront cottage in Gulf Shores, Alabama in the summer. One July evening when there was no moon and calm seas, my dad announced conditions were just right, and we would go floundering that night. Now you may have floundered …
A song I recently heard included an interesting line: “If the present is a place that my future will define, I want to slow things down and take a little time…”* While I don’t know what the songwriter intended, the words prompted me to consider how people view the present. Some, as this lyric might …
Our friends’ son enlisted in the U.S. Army right after high school. He rose to become an elite Ranger, then later a Green Beret and a member of the Special Forces Dive Team. At one point, within days of his unit’s deployment to Iraq, his parents called to tell him a close relative, like a …
Memorial Day morning, 2020, while doing some laundry, I overheard my wife listening to a podcast. It seemed the speaker first addressed the meaning of the holiday, remembering soldiers who died to preserve our freedom. He then suggested that our best response was not to mourn, but to make the most of our lives. As …
A book I’ve been reading states that the human body boasts eleven million sensory receptors, and ten million of those relate to sight. The author also shared an estimate that interpretation of visual signals accounts for 50% of brain activity. Reading that, my mind immediately recalled words written ages ago by the Apostle Paul: For …
We once sang a Sunday School song, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna to let it shine…” If kids were to sing that nowadays, they’d whip out their cell phones, turn on a flashlight app, and start waving them! The song actually comes from the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. … Let …
“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” This and similar aphorisms were often repeated by my father as I grew up. I’m sure it was spoken in various contexts, but I suspect it was most often associated with getting somewhere faster or something being done more efficiently. It’s certainly true in the …
The current pandemic has triggered unprecedented events, including our youngest daughter’s recent college campus closure. The school ordered students to vacate on short notice, continuing all coursework online for the rest of the semester, so we suddenly needed to get her moved back home. We and our daughter‘s older sister caravanned down on Saturday morning thinking we’d easily …
