October is Pastor Appreciation Month. The first pastor I remember was L.B. Reavis, from whom I received my middle name. He was followed by E. Hermond Westmoreland, under whose ministry I became a Christian. During my teen-age, pre-college years, my pastor was my own father, W. Edwin Crawford, under whose ministry and influence I surrendered…
Since grief is such a big subject, there isn’t a single definition that covers it. A commonly used definition is “Grief is the normal and natural emotional reaction to loss or change of any kind.” Let me illustrate. Last week I attended a conference that involved several hundred cross-cultural missionaries, some of whom were former…
Referring to an annoyance, or a nuisance, as “a pain in the neck” is a colloquial expression that dates from about 1900. My first “pain in the neck” came when I was fifteen years old and was involved in an automobile accident, sustaining a broken second vertebrae of my neck. The healing took nine months….
To my surprise, the church announced their high-attendance Sunday goal and then prayed that God would help them to reach it. I was only their Interim Pastor, so was not in on the setting of the goal. When I asked how they arrived at the number, the answer was that it was ten more people…
How quickly some of the things we build get destroyed. From the time I started public school until I graduated from High School, my family lived in six houses. Five of them no longer exist. The first church I remember attending now has all new buildings. The two buildings where I took all of my…
I made yet another emotional trip to Tennessee, this time to pick up several boxes of my late brother’s possessions – another trip I thought I’d never need to make. The trip home with the boxes was strangely like bringing him back home to Texas. Born in Houston (ten years after my own Texas birth),…
What does a real friend do? I now have a new answer to that question. It was a sickening feeling to arrive at my hotel and begin unpacking my luggage only to miss seeing the small zip-lock bag containing my prescription medication. A call home revealed that the bag was indeed ready for the trip…
I’m about to try something I’ve not done before. For many years I occupied the Chair of Prayer at Southwestern Baptist Seminary and taught a very popular course on prayer each semester. I’ve also used those class notes to teach prayer on Sunday nights or Wednesday nights in churches where I served as Interim Pastor…
There really is something about presence that is meaningful. Its why people visit grave sites to leave flowers and a dozen other objects of meaning. Its why people keep a container of the ashes of a loved one in their home. We do what we must do to cope with what we can’t quite accept….
We celebrated our wedding anniversary last week and were reminded that our wedding prayer of commitment was sung, not spoken, and one word was changed: “My heart, my life, my all I bring to Christ who loves me so; He is my Master, Lord, and King, wherever He leads (I’ll) we’ll go.” We began as…