Month: January 2018

When you are a child, everything looks big. The house I grew up in on Shadburn Avenue in Buford felt like a mansion. The hallway in the center of the house seemed to stretch for miles. The back yard was as big as a Montana prairie. But when you return as an adult to visit those childhood haunts, everything has been downsized.  That capacious corridor is a tight, three-step hallway in a tiny house on a postage stamp lot. The more candles I add to my birthday cake, the more those places that loomed so large seem to shrink. The … Read more…

When our boys were growing up, we tried to expose them to as many different sports, music, theater and academic adventures as possible. We figured it was better to let them sample a wide variety than to force them to specialize in one thing. Your results may vary, but that seemed to work well for us and our guys. There was, however, one athletic experience I adamantly opposed – scoreless soccer. That’s where everybody gets to play the match but the points don’t count. Officially, anyway. Trust me, with a bunch of competitive parents standing on the sidelines, someone was … Read more…

I have never been very fond of the Bible-as-a-Love-Story approach to scripture. Other than Song of Solomon, it isn’t all that romantic. And whenever I hear the words “love” and “story” in the same sentence, I see two people running in slow motion across a field of flowers, falling into a tender embrace just as the soundtrack crescendos into a flurry of ecstatic violins. It’s kind of hard to fit the Levitical holiness codes for how to handle mold and mildew into that framework. Nevertheless, the Bible is a story. I don’t mean that the Bible is fiction like The … Read more…

Happy New Year! First, thank you for reading, commenting on and sharing the blog throughout 2017. Your thoughts, challenges and encouragement have been a blessing. I am looking forward to – no, that’s not quite right – I am excited about where we’re going next. Our church, Twickenham, has launched an initiative to be in the Word in 2018. We’ve committed to reading the Bible cover to cover, from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the City of God in Revelation. I am inviting you to join us. But I wouldn’t blame you if you had some doubts. Lots … Read more…