My child, my gift, my life. Would I have been in church that Sunday morning if I was them? Or any Sunday? Is it reasonable to acknowledge God as good when life has dealt you a blow that almost crushes you every day? The Mom was seated a few rows ahead of me. As the…
Issues
How do you shed the crown?
When I finished Who made you King?, I realized I had only scratched the surface of the topic’s relevance to my own life. The trail is long and littered with my self-contained decisions. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I had stayed single and responsible only to myself. But I didn’t. And I packed my…
Who made you King?
Spoiler alert. I will be ‘bashing’ men in this reflection. It is unapologetically one-sided. The emoting is my own and not a summary of stuff from the internet (other than a few statistics). If you don’t care for where this is going, please abort now. As time passes, I am increasingly turned off common distasteful…
My name is Jay
I met Jay at Walmart on a cold winter morning. Just outside the entrance door as I was going in. The funnel hood on his parka, rolled all the way forward, pushed a ring of long unruly hair out the front that largely hid his face from view. And made him look pretty scary. A…
“If only . . .” or “At least . . .”? – the power of regret
It was the women’s individual cycling road race at 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Anna van der Breggen (center) won gold “by the width of a tire.” Emma Johansson (on left) got silver. And Elisa Borghini (on right) came in third for bronze. At the finish line, Anna (gold) raised her arms in…
Darrell and Barbara – an encounter with fellowship
In A ‘problem’ with “Ask Jesus into your heart,” I introduced ‘differentiation’ and ‘integration’ to describe how individuals and organizations work to create their identify. They outline differences to distinguish themselves from others (differentiation) or similarities to show avenues of potential alignment (integration). I shared how Indigenous students in a conservative evangelical college exemplified these…
“You can do it . . . !”
“You can do it, Ron! You can do it!” Mile 17 or 18 of the New York City Marathon. What’s often called ‘hitting the wall.’ A point in the 26.2 miles where a runner longs to just collapse into a fetal position on the sidewalk. I had already shifted into an even slower gear than…
A Tale of Two . . . – “Can’t we all just get along?”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it…
To Swear or Not to Swear, . . . That is the question
I know, it may be ‘cheesy’ to do a spin on Shakespeare’s ‘to be or not to be.’ But it makes the title more appealing than ‘Language Used at Work, at Home, and Everywhere Else‘ (my original title). My personal history with ‘swear’ words is pretty conservative. When our son was in his mid to…
On ‘Just because I could . . .’
Postscript (February 2026) For the backstory on my comments below, you should first read “Just because I could . . . a thing called ‘Power’.” In May 2025, a town hall meeting was called in protest to the sudden ban of all boats on the lake. The Park Superintendent who made that fateful decision was…