by Barry Creamer | Jan 18, 2023 | Devotionals
I took the familiar hand in mine, looking down each aisle as we walked along the back of the store. When I glanced up to see a stranger’s face where my mother’s should have been, realized that not-my-mother’s-face meant not-my-mother’s-hand, the panic sufficed to etch...
by Barry Creamer | Jan 11, 2023 | Devotionals
If I’m ever lost in the neighborhood, wave a piece of technology and I’ll come running back. Inexcusably and ironically, I would rather use or fix technology than do something with it; preferring a monitor’s resolution to whatever it displays, an instrument’s timbre...
by Barry Creamer | Jan 4, 2023 | Devotionals
In 1981, cell phones are less likely in the future than the giant appliances the Jetsons use to make video calls. Out of the cash I should have shepherded better through the week, and with only a quarter tank in the Cutlass Supreme Coupe my parents handed down to me...
by Barry Creamer | Dec 28, 2022 | Devotionals
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. …My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” There is more...
by Barry Creamer | Dec 21, 2022 | Devotionals
God told geriatric Abraham he would have a son, and he did. He revealed to Manoah’s wife their son would be holy, and he was. He promised melancholic Hanna she would birth a prophet, and she did. He swore to give Israel a king; they cared for their bitter relative and...
by Barry Creamer | Dec 14, 2022 | Devotionals
The temple provides setting for all 3 opening accounts in Luke’s gospel—John the Baptist’s birth, Jesus’ birth, and young Jesus’ return to Jerusalem without his parents. In the temple, Gabriel announces John’s coming birth to Zechariah, Zechariah and Elisabeth name...
by Barry Creamer | Dec 7, 2022 | Devotionals
Rocking, basking, relaxing on the front porch, she is clearly master of her 2-acre domain; at least, that’s what I extrapolate at 25 bumpy miles-per-hour on the pockmarked road passing along her fence, the path my sub-par GPS has mapped for me on the way to a church...
by Barry Creamer | Nov 30, 2022 | Devotionals
The smell of musty paper, the look of newly white or agedly yellow leaves, the whispered sound of a turning page—none of those things affects me like so many (so, so many) of my friends. I don’t know why. I actually admire that sentiment in others; I just don’t have...
by Barry Creamer | Nov 23, 2022 | Devotionals
One opposite to time’s moment is eternity-to-come: “then” replacing “now”; future’s fulness overcoming present’s poverty. Thoreau uses a stream to describe another opposition: a juxtaposition of what is constantly passing with what just as constantly remains. “Time is...
by Barry Creamer | Nov 16, 2022 | Devotionals
I stand at an intersection waiting for the light to cycle so I can cross a major thoroughfare. To my left, oncoming traffic in the right lane heads directly for me, my safety resting entirely in the drivers’ compliance with the road’s gentle bend. I am flippantly...
