Old friends buried their son a week ago today— at twenty-two-years-old, his death in a gun accident was unlooked for— a painful understatement. Words like tragic, awful, and heart-wrenching come to mind but fall short of the abrupt end-of-life-as-we-know-it reality. We fall headlong off the cliff of unlooked for disasters. The death of the... Continue Reading →
Ode to Bill, or, Let the Cream Rise!
Bill Buckley was one of my favorite authors in the halcyon days of my late 20s when I was discovering kindred spirits in all things religious and political. I cut my politically inclined teeth on Buckley in National Review and loved the fact that I needed a dictionary when I read his articles! It... Continue Reading →
Justice Stumbling
I visited the Kansas Supreme Court building recently, a building I had a very small part in building back in 1977. While John Jones and I worked outside this landmark to justice providing water proofing membrane under the exterior granite walkway, a sculptor was working inside the building providing a symbolic element, the statue Justice. A... Continue Reading →
Taking out the Trash
Looking out the window of one of my favorite coffee shops (Panera’s), a petite young employee, company baseball cap sitting low over her pigtails, is wrestling large bags of trash. The bags are almost half her size and she’s attempting to raise them high enough to drop them into the large trash container in the... Continue Reading →
Eating Honey
The production of honey has to be one of the coolest and most mind boggling processes on the planet. Consider these facts: A colony of up to 100,000 bees will visit over 2,000,000 flowers in 12 square miles and fly the equivalence of the earth’s circumference twice to produce one pound of honey. A single... Continue Reading →
Toasting in Babylon
It must have been quite a party— the surroundings were opulent, the guests represented the cream of society, the food was the best the world had to offer, and the wine! The wine was an elixir; its intoxicating influence gave those who imbibed an enlarged sense of themselves and their own importance. No wonder the... Continue Reading →
Pharisees All
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like... Continue Reading →
Rage Against the Lord
The foolishness of man ruins his way, and his heart rages against the LORD. Proverbs 19:3 We might think of foolishness, or folly, as something typical of untaught children, or older youth who are still without wisdom informing experiences, or maybe even adults slow on the uptake. But in Proverbs, folly isn’t... Continue Reading →
Slipping Into Life
June 6, 2013Cambria, CASitting on the boardwalk at the edge of the world on California’s coast and the waves roll in and roll out again. Squadrons of pelicans, all head and wings, glide up the coast, slow flapping and so close to the water I expect to see the water ripple under their wing tips-... Continue Reading →
What Will We Do in the End?
We were sitting in church after a Sunday morning service, lazily engaging in conversation, when we noticed a young boy, Drew (not his real name) up on the stage. There’d been a skit during the service about Paul and Silas’ time in the Philippian jail complete with working, theatrical stocks. Drew was having a great... Continue Reading →
Applied Heart 