A Word About… Handwriting Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit about handwriting. There’s something deeply personal about it, I think. A signature on a document. A note scrawled in the margin of a well-worn Bible. A letter, faded with time, written by a hand that is now long gone from this world. It may…
A Word About Voting, … Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation of Lk. 17 caught my attention the other day. He translated v. 33 of Luke 17: ‘If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms.’ Lk. 17:33 An interesting…
A Word About Testimonies … When I was a little boy growing up in Granite City, Illinois, on hot summer Wednesday nights in our neighborhood, I often found it my lot to go to Wednesday Night prayer meeting with my little granny. She wasn’t five feet tall in the flesh, but she was…
A Word about Perception I read an article recently that said that if we paid attention to the number of advertisements we’re exposed to on any given day, the total would be anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 appeals … EVERY DAY. Wow! I know they’re everywhere I look; appeals, ads, commercials. But I had…
A word about, … Almost All of us can reflect back on our lives and recall occasions, events, moments when things didn’t quite materialize or measure up to or pan out the way we thought they would. Maybe they came close. Almost, though. The dictionary says “Almost” is very nearly … but not…
A word about … pieces Not often —but sometimes — we put a jigsaw puzzle together at my house. We usually choose the puzzle based on the picture on the box. Maybe it’s a puzzle of a flower garden, or a mountain scene. Once, we had a puzzle of a bunch of jelly…
A word about, … Creations If you come over to my house and check out my closet, you’ll find two or three brand new shirts I haven’t worn yet. I got them for Christmas. I’m not even sure Ive taken the tags of them yet. New shirts, sweaters, a new pocket knife. I got…
A Word About, … Another Ending One of my favorite storytellers is Mark Twain. I have a picture of him, in fact, hanging in my office. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri and I grew up near St. Louis. His ‘times’ were much different than mine, his personal life tragic in many ways,…
A Word about, … Christmas Once, not so long ago for God I suppose, He did a very strange thing. On an ordinary day, the Lord, the Son of God, prepared to take His leave of heaven. I cannot say what the weather was like the day He left, but it must have…
A Word About, … Authenticity I don’t know how many times I’ve asked the question, but I have been known to ask a person I’m chatting with: “Do you journal?” The answers vary, of course, depending on the person. But there are some responses that seem to be most frequent: It’s either ‘Yes,”…