Month: January 2015

I start going to the gym again once every four years or so.  Which is dumb because starting is always the hardest part. First, you have to muster the courage to walk through the steamy doors into a world where you clearly do not belong.  In between sets of bench pressing a million pounds, the regulars look at you with accusing eyes, then turn their sculpted backs and whisper to each other. I bet they say things like, “See that guy? Looks like he hasn’t seen the inside of a gym in four years or so.” Second, it hurts. I mean physically.  After … Read more…

Surely, gentle surfer of “The Internets,” you have seen the banner ads promising to cure your diabetes, reduce your weight, increase your metabolism, enhance your love life, drop your auto insurance rates, get you out of your last speeding ticket, and improve your golf swing if you’ll just try this. . . One . . . Weird . . . Trick.  It’s tempting. I mean the letters are even flashing.  And the guy in the picture learned Italian in a week. Why else would language professors hate him?  That mom from Georgia is making more money than a Saudi prince. Working from home. … Read more…

“In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Dr. King knew that some moments want words.  Sometimes, statements have to be made, songs must be sung, words beg to be spoken.  There is a time for silence. Solomon said so.  But for every time you wish you’d kept your mouth shut, I’ll bet there are three when you wrote speeches after the fact of all the things you could have said — all the things you should have said but didn’t.  Sometimes, the moment is so special, the offense is so … Read more…

Well, the blog is about two weeks old now, and I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for the way you’ve received it.  Thank you for your kind comments and encouragement.  Kudos to my daughter-in-law Katie, for helping set things up.  I’m really excited about today’s post.  It’s from my wife, Lisa.  She knows a thing or two about the subject, so pay attention.  And enjoy.  Thanks.   Sibling stories in the Bible fascinate me. Sometimes I wonder what unrecorded events happened between Cain and Abel or, maybe decades later, between Cain and Seth. And what about … Read more…

Recently, a group at our church tried to hear Genesis chapter 1 with fresh ears.  That’s hard to do for a lot of reasons.  Genesis is not exactly unexplored textual territory for Wednesday nighters in the Church of Christ.  They’ve known which thing God created on which day since they learned the Creation Song in Sister Jones’ Sunday school class back in 1972.  I mean, they are so biblically literate, can you imagine what glory would ensue if a Wednesday night regular appeared on Jeopardy and scored a Bible related category? “I’ll take obscure Bible characters for 1,000, Alex.” “And … Read more…

The Internet is already old.  Which sounds peculiar coming from me.  I’m in that cohort that kept dimes in the ashtray on road trips so you could make calls from pay phones to let the folks back home (or at your intended destination) know where you were.  And if you got lost, you consulted a fold-up map from the glove box to navigate your way back to the correct route.  So calling “old” something that came into existence, struggled through its own awkward adolescence and reached maturity in my life time seems oddly self-incriminating. But dust accumulates much faster these days, or so it … Read more…