God’s Goodness

Serene if not sleepy, steering eastward, I watch a platter-size sun first divided by rolling horizon, then barred between banks of land and cloud, and finally disappearing behind the cumulus it backlights with coral and surrounds with radiating silver bands. I did not...

For Ordinary Believers in Every Circumstance

On a plain, Jesus gives the command: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…. and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.” Between a rock and hard place, we whittle at...

A New Day, a New Opportunity to Love People

The man seated opposite me is probably a decade my senior. Lean and muscular to excess, he is snacking on a health bar and appears oblivious to my existence, which is fine with me. I am not there to see him. I am there because I want to join my grandchildren for...

The Earth Is His

A preschooler, I worry wide-eyed that the Rio Grande’s current will sweep me away with the car in which my parents have placed me. The water and flow rise with my terror, but the adults manage to forge the river safely back into Texas after our day of ministry in...

Birds Rushed In

According to this CBS News story (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bald-eagle-birds-migration-covid-lockdown/), the Covid-driven human hibernation of 2020’s spring likely prompted an ornithological flourishing: a significant increase in the presence of 80% of observed...

The Only Appropriate Response Is Humility

As I drive one morning to a preaching engagement, eastern sunlight gilds a foggy mist rising from the lawn on my left. Similar vapor ascends from a creek on the right. It is not fog, not a cloud: it gathers only above bodies of water or dew-laden lawns, returning to...

New Beginnings

He spent 17 years planting churches with his father in the Midwest—some still active today. He served in the Navy on Okinawa and Iwo Jima. He taught music at the collegiate level, then owned and managed a five and dime store, then a ranch, until he decided to make and...

The Storm Makes the Tale

In a journal I only recently saw for the first time, my Granny, deceased many years now, writes of an older relative who would tell her juvenile self and siblings ghost stories at night. The stories, she says, were so terrifying that at bedtime she and the other young...

Suffering Is Not an Afterthought in Christianity

A long wooden footbridge crosses an alcove of White Rock Lake. Pedaling across it one day, something coming from behind breaks the surface of my peripheral vision, head height, about 10 yards to the right, over the water. About a half-mile back I saw for the first...