Since before the last millennium, Friend Glenda and I have celebrated each other on our birthdays. We’ve lunched at home and restaurants; picnicked under pines and strolled beside lakes. Once we spent an afternoon making each other friendship books filled with quotes and collages. This year, before I turned the …
I have one less big mistake to make in life. After praying too little and worrying too much I marched nobly forth and took a job to help fill a few gaps in the family budget. Perhaps the problem wasn’t as much the job as my choice of job. In …
Tomorrow he would hang for love alone, to become the bridge of light and life between God and mankind. To cancel sin’s power over you and me. But Jesus, hours before his crucifixion, prayed in a garden. Please don’t picture a neatly groomed, long-haired man sitting on a large rock …
The sun hefted itself in a glorious yellow blaze over my office windowsill today. “Watch for good things,” God seemed to whisper. Indeed. My smile won’t straighten. Precisely 38 miles Southwest of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 90 miles West of Huntsville, Alabama, 42 miles Northeast of Tupelo, Mississippi, 123 miles …
On a raw winter day during calving season a year or so ago, the Preacher and I visited some rancher friends. “Come out and see the babies,” Diane said. Inside the maternity barn, our breath wreathed around our mouths. We walked down the wide center aisle between stalls pungent with …
Lakshmi* is a Christian Dalit woman I met in India years ago. Her gentle smile and deeply haunted eyes, caught in a photo, captivated me long before I made the trip. Over there, despite the barriers between us—language, nationality, distance—we formed a connection I can’t explain. During a Bible study …
Who said, “Practice makes perfect,” anyway? I’ve been a practicing Christian for over four decades. Many days I feel I’ll never get it right. In spite of a lifetime of following Christ, I still haven’t sprouted angel wings or sprung a halo. (Just ask my family.) Sometimes I can’t even …
“Know what? We need a scapegoat,” I told the Preacher. “Someone to take the blame for everything that goes wrong around here.” He chuckled. It all started the day the car stereo died. We’d had music on the way to our friends’ home, but driving back, the radio wouldn’t turn …
The Preacher and I spoke at one of our former churches a while back. The platform seemed lower and wider, but the church had changed little in two decades. It took a long time to get to my seat—too many friends lined the aisles. And I would have missed Lisa …
Could have been his grey hair. Most likely his walker, a long-term result of his West Nile neurological Disease. But a few weekends back, someone much younger guessed the Preacher’s age at 75—almost two decades up the road. It stuck in his craw, I think. At precisely 8:45 last evening, …
