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...

240 Successive Slow-Stalking Cats

Four minutes remain before my homemade fat-free pita-pizza is ready to pull from the oven. Normally, four minutes are a fleeting fifteenth of an hour. Now that I’m hungry, though, four minutes are 240 successive slow-stalking cats. I turn my back on the clock,...

Eternity’s Always Promising Attraction

There is a towering cumulus cloud billowing to the west as the sun sets. Its internal hues lean just enough to darker grays and blues to declare that given the right atmospheric circumstance, it could have been a cumulonimbus. But the golds, salmons, and fuchsias...

God Declares That You Are the Light of the World

“And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light...

Jesus Feigns Nothing

As an 8th grade novitiate to speech and debate, I watch the team’s 9th grade apotheosis practice her oratory. Her delivery is impeccable, sans pause verbal or not. I am mildly surprised to learn after the weekend tournament that she placed only second. I am downright...

The Noise Which Distracts

We borrowed a dog. He needed a place to be for a while, and we could do it, so we did. As it turns out, he is two dogs in a single, small, short-legged, black-coated, old-man-faced package. One of his personalities is proof that humankind has kept canine companionship...