My father was a workaholic. My mother was a perfectionist. Put them together and you get me. If I had to remember one key word of my early life it would be the word “excellence.” It was never enough to be average – not in school, nor in athletics, nor various methods of competition. I carried this early training into…
Mugs and Prayer We’ve been selling everything in a rent house in order to eventually sell the house, and as a part of it, we took advantage and added some other stuff in order to downsize. In my last office move, I no longer had room for my campus mugs. During my collegiate ministry and…
Interim is a term describing the space of time between an ending and a beginning. When used for a church it refers to the time between the departure of one pastor and the arrival of another pastor. Since Baptist churches do not have Bishops who appoint a successor, the interim time can be long as each church…
You suspect God is calling you for some special task or even for a career of ministry. How can you know your call is from the Lord? In the Bible, people such as Samuel (1 Sam 3:4-10) and Isaiah (Isa 6:8) experienced direct, audible calls from God. These instances left no doubt about the divine…
The last couple of weeks I have written about movies that I should not have attended. Let me go a different direction today and mention a favorite movie of mine. I could go back to my early years and mention a couple of films that few of my readers would remember but let me mention one that…
My manna of last week, including a confession of attending the movie “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in spite of my Pastor-Farther advising me not to go see it, stirred up a lot of response. All of which reminded me of another movie I should not have seen, only this one was during my college…
Memory is one of God’s greatest gifts. The writer of Proverbs says, “The memory of the just is blessed” (Proverbs 10:7). I’m a member of a Facebook group called, “Houston Memories.” Recently a picture of the inside of the Majestic Theater brought back memories of Friday night double dates. One particular, Friday evening, as I…
In a recent year, 4500 Protestant churches closed, while only 3,000 opened, making it the first year that the number of churches being added to the country had declined. Some saw this coming. I remember a Chapel sermon in the 1980s, delivered by a Senior Professor entitled, “Dead Churches and Delayed Funerals.” In addition, at…
Steve and I sat in the Bar B-Que Restaurant for three hours. Everyone else had come and gone, but we were enjoying one of God’s greatest gifts – the gift of memory. We were reminiscing. Five decades previous, I had gone to The University of Texas as the Director of Baptist Student Ministry. I had…
In Japan it is a 16th century tradition called “Forgetting the Year” party, in which people gather on New Years Eve and burn their old calendars in a way of moving on to the new year. An old Irish tradition is to open the front door of your house at midnight, in order to let…