by Barry Creamer | Apr 6, 2022 | Devotionals
Country music songwriters, politicians, and marketers know the power of nostalgia. And better times past can be more than rose-tinged memories. Childhood should be safer with fewer cares than adulthood. So songs, campaigns, and ads invite us back to better times. When...
by Barry Creamer | Mar 30, 2022 | Devotionals
Sunshine illuminates blue skies, inviting bright demeanors, optimistic outlooks, an end to sorrow. Yet in the 19th Psalm the heat of sunshine stands in for the general revelation of God’s judgment, from which everyone wishes to hide. Rain falls from dreary or hostile...
by Barry Creamer | Mar 23, 2022 | Devotionals
An alarm in the hospital room I am visiting obnoxiously and persistently signifies apparently nothing, but does make it equally impossible and inevitable to think of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron. In that dystopian short fiction, the United States Handicapper...
by Barry Creamer | Mar 16, 2022 | Devotionals
Everyman: Want to go get something to eat? Her: Sure. Everyman: Where do you want to go? Her: Wherever you want is fine. Everyman: How about [placeholder-for-anywhere-he-names]? Her: Oh, maybe not there. Everyman: [muttered euphemisms then resignation that she can...
by Barry Creamer | Mar 9, 2022 | Devotionals
We often overlook the mountain for the fissure within it. A friendship’s forest hides behind a conflict’s tree; a lifetime of provision behind a year of privation; love’s ocean behind anger’s wave. When we see something is wrong with the world, what should we give, or...
