I was recently in a ministry planning meeting in another country where the percentage of believers is low and resources even lower. One of the leaders exclaimed, “We do what we have to do, to get done what needs to get done.” That’s a philosophy of life with which I am very familiar. My grandfather…
At a Bar B.Q. restaurant I recently ordered a two-meat dinner of sliced brisket and sausage. When I finished cutting the brisket into normal size bites, I had a total of six bites of rather thin sliced meat. I know the price of beef is increasing, but this clearly was not the portion I wanted….
I spent my pre-college, teen-age years living in the city of Houston, Texas. My small-town parents worried constantly for my safety and sanity in the big city. Thus they set boundary lines for me. There were certain parts of the city where I was not allowed, and certain places that were off-limits to me. As…
How many times have you thought, “I wish things were different?” I confess to having that thought a few times. On one occasion, I was so disturbed about circumstances; I went to three trusted friends for advice. One of them encouraged me to stop focusing on the circumstances and start focusing on my response to…
Last spring I received a phone call from a friend from teen-age years asking me to pray for him because the doctors had given him only a few weeks to live. I was out of the country when I received the call, but assured him that as soon as I returned home, I would be…
On a recent Sunday, my new pastor rolled out a new vision statement with some rather drastic changes in our church’s methodology. Seated in the back, I could see the looks, observe the whispers, and watch the body language of the mostly senior adults in my section. We seniors kind of like to keep things…
Last week I shared about the broken second vertebra of my neck during the teenage years and the many answered prayers of Pastors wives during the course of my nine month healing. Since the bones were not healing at the four month mark, surgery was scheduled in which my neck bones were to be wired…
When I was a teenager, my father was Pastor of a church in Houston, Texas and my mother was President of a city-wide Pastor Wives organization. On a cold-December night I lay in an Emergency Room with a broken second vertebra of the neck, hearing doctors saying it was a miracle I was alive, and…
A friend, who is my age, said to me recently, “Please stop writing about aging, you’re making me feel old.” So this is about youth. My grandson Price is twelve years old. He loves baseball, hunting, and fishing. His room is a collection of “game balls.” He has already killed two deer – one with…
Three funerals in ten days! I guess one should expect that in the later years of life. At least I have been in the pulpit and pew, and not in the casket. Or as one friend exclaimed, “We’re still on the green side of the grass!” The three deceased were very different in personalities and…