just enough light

These past couple of days I continued the process of throwing away dad’s stuff as I’ve been doing since his death over a year ago. Dad was a historian at heart. He loved to dig into the background of things, he documented events, and he saved the paperwork. I just went through several notebooks that […]

To the 30 and 40 somethings who are not planning to vote this year, think about it. Deciding to not vote would be like trying to punish the old high school teacher you despised by refusing to study for the final exam. No one is hurt by that choice but you! Up until a few […]

–An excessively detailed account of a fleeting moment of near insignificance that highlights the enormous importance of place and consistency. A few years ago, when my early morning attendance at Starbucks was more regular, when the Baristas knew me by my first name and my order of dark roast, and the other early morning customers […]

I don’t particularly like to shave. It’s just one of those necessities, once or twice each week to keep from looking to scruffy or if I have somewhere to go that requires looking civil. Recently, however, a shave was more than a shave. Judy and I were vacationing at the cottage in Maine, my favorite […]

I threw away a bunch of papers today. A simple but difficult task. The simple part was pulling a file folder, flipping through it, and tossing it and its contents in a pile to discard. The difficult task was looking at the pages in many of the files one last time, remembering the significance, and […]

Fifty years ago this month, I moved to Austin, Texas and began my work as the youth minister at Woodlawn Baptist Church. As a recent graduate from seminary, I was eager to get to work in my first full-time position in church ministry.  I knew I was facing some challenges. Woodlawn was a larger church […]

“Clearing the road.” That is one of the many Biblical images during the Christmas season. The Gospel of Mark tells us that John the Baptist did that for Jesus. The gallery of my life is full of portraits of people who have cleared the road for me. One person came to mind recently. His impact […]

My writing routine, and I use the word “routine” instead of “discipline” because it’s nowhere close to a discipline, is to read a short section from a book about writing, and then do “Morning Pages,” a few pages of free-writing in a spiral notebook. I begin each entry with “Morning Pages,” followed by the date, […]

My dad died 7 months ago. Hard to believe. His death did not make a big splash. He slipped from this life hardly rippling the water. Only a few people knew it when it happened, and there were few to inform once it did.  Had dad died any time in the past several decades, his […]

On July 24, 1982, I watched Frank Shorter tie his running shoes. That’s it. At about 7:30 on that warm, clear Saturday morning, I was preparing to run in the Bix 7, an annual 7-mile race in Davenport, Iowa, part of the Bix Jazz Festival. It was during my pre-race stretching and nervous walking around […]