I am a work in progress...

My attempt at a Kestrel.

Choosing to Dance…

For a while now I have thought that we stand  in the “now” with all the past behind us and the future before us. The past, fixed and static, like bedrock. The future, changing and shifting, like snow in a blizzard. As with most things in life, my thinking is changing and evolving. I think that we stand mostly in the past by default but look towards the future through our gift of self…

Hello…

I firmly believe that sometimes we really, really, really overcomplicate the bible message. Sometimes a verse or even a phrase will be picked out and picked on and dissected and put back together in ten different ways and still gets interpreted so that mere mortals can’t understand it at all.

Heres one for you:

John 20:19 New Living Translation (NLT) That Sunday evening the disciples were meeting…

Going Commando …

Yesterday I went “Commando”.

Yes, it’s true. I left my smartphone at home and left the house. When I realized what I had done, I actually felt naked, like something important was missing. Then come all the thoughts:

“What if something important comes up?”

“What if I want to see what the weather is going to do?”

“Should I turn around and go get it?”

And then the absurdity of the whole situation…

Tammy would much rather play the card game Spades and not the card game Hearts. She doesn’t care for Hearts because, as she puts it “I don’t like it when someone else drops points on me, I would much rather get the points on my own”.

That pretty much sums up what I have seen on the news and social media for the last week/month/year after a seemingly endless series of horrific events.  The…

Time, the Fourth Dimension…

We exist in time. Our entire existence has only known time. We measure our very being by the amount of time that has passed since our inception. Even though we are immersed in time and it’s effects on us, time remains very elusive to define.

Time is what makes it possible for you to read these words. We (or at least most of us) don’t absorb an entire sentence at once, much less a paragraph,…

Out of Time…

During a recent writing class I had the assignment of choosing a topic as though I were writing a book. The topic I picked was on the nature of time as it relates to God. I haven’t written a book before (if you don’t count my thesis) although I feel as though I have written enough words in my career to fill several books.  But, there is a huge difference in general writing and book writing.  I…

It was a typical summer day in Oklahoma, hot and humid. Temperatures pushing, if not exceeding, 100 degrees. The humidity was high. We were thankful that we only had a short walk from the car to the building. Passing from air conditioning to air conditioning and enjoying the chilled air as a break from the oppressive heat. We were doing visits to different businesses before making our final…

The years between…

Some of my favorite observations about the nature of our relationship with God come from the Old Testament. One of those is the theme that “Abraham forgets”.

It is easy to read the story of Abraham and his family straight through just like it was a (rather long) short story. It is easy to get caught up in the soaring epic tales and yes, the soap opera drama of a dysfunctional family. A troubled…

Cheater…

I cheated at a game last week. There wasn’t any money or prestige on the line but I cheated anyway. Oh… and I lost. Yes, I cheated to lose.

The thing is, nobody in my family will play monopoly with me anymore. I learned how to play when I was growing up with a pretty cut throat set of monopoly players. The first time I played with my family, got a monopoly, mortgaged every other piece of property…

Tammy and I were joking the other day that we had it backwards on cars and houses. Most people we know buy a car every few years and keep their houses for a long time. For us, the norm is to buy a house every few years and keep our cars until they die of old age.

Every house purchase has had a purpose. Sometimes the purpose was not know until well after the move, sometimes the purpose was known…

Learning…

It was very quiet at our house tonight. Tammy and I are taking a class in writing and we had to do our homework. The class is on writing and publishing non-fiction books.

I have wanted to write a book for some time now. I have one started and a couple of chapters written, but as I write I also realize that I don’t know the nuts and bolts of how to go about putting together a book coherently and…

The hole left behind…

There was that time I fell through the ceiling…

There were a couple of fortunate things about the whole incident.

First, I didn’t fall all the way through, my leg went through and I got stuck for a minute or two , there was yelling, family trying to push me back up without success for a while, but I finally was able to climb back into the attic.

Second, … ok, maybe there was only one good thing…

Running with scissors…

Death really stinks. Our neighbor across the street died this week, the day after celebrating Christmas. Needless to say, the family is devastated. She was younger than me and probably more healthy overall. As my wife rhetorically asked, “What do you do with that?“.

Anytime I step outside I see the top of the high school stadium. The place where, a few months ago, a young person fell to their…

I keep a picture of Tammy on my phone screen. It is one of my favorites of her, just looking at me like I am the sexiest man alive. I keep it there for a different reason than a lot of people do. You see, I can’t hold a picture of her in my head.

I only recently found out about this thing called ‘aphantasia’. It was describing how most people see images in their minds when they close their eyes,…