Month: September 2015

The film 90 Minutes in Heaven has hit theaters. It’s based on the story of Pastor Don Piper who was pronounced dead after an auto accident. Piper lay under a tarp at the scene of the accident for an hour-and-a-half. During that time, Piper says, his soul was in Heaven experiencing the greatest peace and joy he has ever known. As the movie title makes clear, however, he didn’t stay there. You can read the book or see the movie and draw your own conclusions. Having done neither, I can’t really comment on the quality of the film (I hope … Read more…

When I was a child, my maternal grandmother, about whom I have written previously, would occasionally recall the seminal historical event of her lifetime — the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’m not sure what prompted her — maybe a war movie on television or the aroma of some particular food cooking in the kitchen — but now and then she’d go back to the moment she and my grandfather heard the news. “Grover was sitting by the radio listening to his program,” she’d begin. “They came on and said the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.” Mee Maw pronounced the word bombed as … Read more…

Years and years ago, at our first church, we hosted a gospel meeting. Perhaps you remember those — a week long series of evening sermons usually beginning on Sunday and lasting through Friday or, later in the shelf-life of that particular tactic, Wednesday. Our Baptist friends called them revivals. They were actually pretty effective back in the day, but then so were things like slide projectors, slide rules and pocket protectors. By the way, since we’ve moved to Huntsville and met real, live rocket scientists, I have actually seen people wearing those shirt-pocket, plastic pen holders. Anyway, we had worked really hard to … Read more…