The church seemed to always be fighting someone – city zoning office, neighborhood association, building contractors, other churches, etc. Once I asked the pastor about such fights and his reply was to the effect that if he could keep his church members busy fighting an outside entity, they wouldn’t turn on him. One day they…
“The long and short of it” is an American idiom, said when one wants to get directly to the point of something without giving details. I’d like to do that with the idea of separation. When he was alive, my father and I attended a host of athletic events together. Occasionally, when an athletic event…
Some years ago I read in a psychology journal of a wide-spread, rather expensive survey that determined that man needed to rest one day in every seven. The Tokyo City Zoo discovered the animals were showing signs of stress until they let them have a day of rest from human interaction. Amazing how humans discover…
I finally bought a Global Positioning System (GPS) but the pronunciation was so poor, I could hardly find my way out of my own neighborhood. And when it told me to exit on Azle Ave., but pronounced it “Ah-zel-avie” I gave it to my granddaughter and went back to a map. I do understand the…
“Putting on the uniform never gets old.” Those were the words of the new Manager of the Fort Worth Cats minor league baseball team, but with an adjustment or two, they could have been my words. I feel that way about my academic regalia. Long ago I lost count of the graduations and convocations in…
It was break time during the Prayer Conference when a participant said to me, “I like everything you are teaching us, but sometimes I just don’t feel like praying.” Do you ever refrain from praying because you just don’t feel like it? It’s Ok to pray because you feel like it, but not OK to…
It seems like only a few nights ago, I was honored to take my young granddaughter, Whitney, to the Father/Daughter Banquet at our church. I remember it well. She was wearing her Strawberry Shortcake dress with the ever-present bow in her hair. I must have taken a Rip Van Winkle type nap, because last Saturday,…
“All in favor raise your right hand.” But I was left-handed until the third grade when a teacher thought left-handedness was a sign of a slow learner and switched me. Did that mean I was discriminated against, because we always voted with our right hands? In church we were always implored to greet new members…
The book began with the words, “This book is by the one who thought he’d be further along by now, but he’s not.” It doesn’t matter who wrote the book, for its author is legion. Nor does it matter the title of the book, for the opening line describes the book everyone hoped to write…
The car in front of me had numerous bumper stickers and the light turned green before I could read all of them. The one I remember said, “Life is hard. Get over it.” It reminded me of a quote from Sydney J. Harris, an American journalist, syndicated in many newspapers throughout the United States and…