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 …
God recently revealed to me how we try to hold on to seasons, events, circumstances, moments in our lives and want to camp there. We do this with all kinds of things. We experience something that seems successful or that makes us happy, and we want to preserve it, systematize it, institutionalize it. We can, …
Years ago, we patronized a bakery outlet that sold day-old bread at a discount, and we’d stock our freezer with it, to feed our dozens of children. (OK, there were only six of them, but it seemed like a lot.) One day I got the mother of our hungry horde a bread-making machine. Which bread …
