One of my seminary professors, Dr. Steve Tracy, earned his doctorate at the University of Sheffield in England. For part of his degree program he relocated his family to the UK.
When Thanksgiving rolled around, they had been there for some time. Long enough to be missing home and family in the United States. They thought [...]

Have you ever been deeply wounded by another person?
Have you ever been deeply wounded by another person who, with deliberate action and malice aforethought, hurt you on purpose?
Have you waited for justice to be served?
And waited some more?
Are you still waiting?
(Maddening, isn’t it?)
In our broken world, wounds come in three ways. Sometimes people wound us [...]

Every house has at least one. 
The “junk drawer”.
Most often found in the kitchen, it usually barely opens. Pull it out five inches and a ruler or a tire pressure gauge or a plastic thingy from some forgotten project gets stuck cross ways and you have to jiggle the drawer back and forth.
Why the plastic thingy is there, you [...]

It was a hard morning for Emma.
Purposely provoking her sister Annie to frustration. Lots of button pushing in her communication with me. A good measure of “I hear what Daddy is saying but I’ll do it when I feel like it.” Then, when called to accountability, blaming her sister or feigning poor hearing as excuses for her actions [...]

Smile.
Crack a joke.
Help the carry out person wrangle a couple stray carts. Write a real paper and pen note to a former teacher telling them what you learned from them. Call your parents and tell them you noticed how much smarter they got after you went to college.
Hold the door for someone.
Let the person behind you [...]

In the aftermath of my relocation to Texas I’ve spent evenings going through all the boxes in the garage, merging and purging as the items dictate. I think it was Erma Bombeck who said, “When you see how quickly things accumulate on their own, you wonder why you bother to save anything on purpose.”
Among the boxes I came [...]

There are some differences between this place I’ve been for a month and Phoenix, the place I was for the past 14 years. For starters, Lubbock is more than ten times smaller. Had I come here straight from the farm, it would have seemed like a big city. But moving from 4 million to 220,000 [...]

Years ago my good friend Fred told me about a delightful conversation he had with his then 3-year old grandson, Nathan. Nathan was just about to have another birthday.
“Grandpa, I don’t want to be 4. I want to stay 3.”
“Why is that?”
“Because after you turn 4, then you turn 5.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Because when you turn [...]

Over the holidays some dear friends gave me a great Christmas present. Tickets to Santa’s Village, a Christmas theme amusement park that sets up each year at Firebird Raceway here in Phoenix. We had a blast on the rides, eating kettle corn and cotton candy. It was a delightful afternoon spent making memories with my twin 6-year [...]

Back in the day, before farmers relied solely on herbicides in their Iowa soybean fields, the preferred method of weeding was “walking beans”. It was a predictable summer job. You’d get your crew together, most of the time your family, spread out and walk down the field getting rid of the weeds that grew. Each [...]

Hope Covenant, my home church, is in Chandler, Arizona. Like the other towns in the Phoenix valley, it began as a small farming town that over the decades morphed into an urban area. About 3 million people live in the metro area known as the “Valley of the Sun”. Vestiges of the former agricultural existence [...]

When I was in high school, a friend of mine made plans to spend his summer riding across the United States with a group of bicycle enthusiasts. For his trip he bought a brand new Sekai touring bike. The bike was expensive and looked it. Everything from wheel to wheel was top of the line. [...]

Most people have likely never heard of my college alma mater, a small Christian liberal arts school in Orange City, Iowa. But since Deb Remmerde went on the CBS Morning Show last Monday a lot more of the country knows about Northwestern College.
 
Deb is a sophomore All-American basketball player for the Lady Raiders. She got [...]

About 12 years ago when we moved to the Phoenix valley one of the things we wanted to do was find a church to attend. We visited quite a few.
One Sunday during a worship service at a church in Mesa, the pianist played a solo. An arrangement of an old hymn. It was one of [...]

Is there a job that you think is beneath you? Has your education, position, title, or wealth elevated you beyond performing mundane tasks?
Ever since high school I had a sense that seminary would be in my future. After graduating from college I realized it wouldn’t be wise for me to go straight to graduate school. [...]