I was browsing a hymnal looking for just the right song to match my sermon this weekend when I spotted the old favorite, In Times Like These. What a great song. Ruth Jones, wrote it in 1944. WWII was raging and the Normandy Invasion was...
JFK once said the secret of success is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are and give good counsel. He said he wanted to be the dumbest person in the room. Some people make the mistake of doing just the opposite...
Things are not always the reality of their billing. The line at the supermarket said, “Express Line – 14 items or less.” What was not true was the word “Express.” The four people in line in front of me each had only two or three...
One of my undergraduate students from Haiti came to class this morning looking like he had just stepped off the cover of GQ magazine. His suit was well tailored, double vented with creases on his trousers that would cut your finger. His tie matched a...
In 1971 Coca Cola adapted a song from a pop group called The New Seekers. It was entitled I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony. The lyrics were as follows: I'd like to build the world a homeAnd furnish it with loveGrow...
About thirty years ago a group of youth pastors in Northern California invited me to accompany them on a trip up Mount Shasta. As a forty something I was the old man among all these twenty somethings. At over 14,100 feet it is the fifth...
I thought it must be boring for my dog to eat the same thing every day so this afternoon I bought her a new kind of dog food. It is 50 pounds of Pedigree for adult dogs with roasted chicken, rice and vegetables flavorings. It...
I am fascinated by the bread aisle in supermarkets. Someday I’m going to count how many different varieties are available. There is Wonder Bread that keeps our bodies healthy in twelve ways. There is Wonder Bread lo-cal that obviously doesn’t keep us healthy in any...
On occasion I hear people talking about how very sinful and rotten the world is becoming. Since I took a ton of history classes for my undergrad degree I’m afraid I have to disagree. The world has always been a rotten place. People didn’t live...
There is a poignant passage at the beginning of Romans 9. Paul was thinking of his friends, his family and all his people. The prospect of them being lost and not sharing in the joy of salvation and the freedom from the burden of the...