just enough light

You’ve seen that text ribbon that scrolls across the bottom of the TV screen. It has news items or basketball scores or Dow Jones numbers. It is small and unobtrusive, but it takes up part of the screen and part of my attention. It detracts from what I am watching. My attention is split. That […]

The act of being still and paying attention is one of the most difficult things for a person to do.   It sounds simple enough. Don’t move around, don’t make noise, and pay attention. No big deal, right? Wrong. Huge deal. And yet, in every religious tradition, this is a basic discipline. You can call it […]

I go through much of my day on automatic pilot. I don’t pay attention to many of the routine things I do each day. I can go through a meal without really paying attention to what I am eating. At the conclusion of a conversation I may remember very little of what was said. I […]

I clearly remember climbing the hill at Lakeview Baptist Encampment that evening of our last day of the church youth retreat. I was 16; it was the summer after my sophomore year. I had spent a long weekend at camp with 30 or so high school kids from our church, my best friends. We gathered […]

It was a typical Advent worship service. I was the choral director, a job I was ill-prepared for, yet I executed my duties for four years as if I knew what I was doing. During this particular Advent season, I had chosen a simple, harmonic Christmas hymn entitled, “Love Came Down” as the choral introduction […]

Political correctness is getting a bad name. Throughout this presidential campaign, Donald Trump has insisted that political correctness was killing our country. Candidates generally choose their words carefully, but now, if they are too careful, they can be accused of being PC and contributing to our country’s demise. This has allowed some to say whatever […]

These are two of the eighteen Chrismons (Christian monograms) we hung once again on our Christmas tree. Judy and I made these Chrismons in the fall of 1974 when I was the Youth Minister for Woodlawn Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. We are hanging them on our tree for the 40th time. They are simple […]

My friend, Karen, died a few weeks ago. She went in for a routine heart catheterization, an exploratory procedure prior to a scheduled open-heart valve replacement. Despite the routine nature of the procedure, she died. Despite intense efforts to revive her, she died. Despite an emergency surgery team scrambling together, she died. Her friends who […]

“I am a nihilist,” Austin declared during one of our conversations around the fire. In the three days together in this remote, idyllic cottage, our conversations had run the gamut from serious to silly, personal to global. This statement did not surprise me. I’d heard it before. One of Austin’s closest friends, a professor of […]

Three days with my son, Austin, in a cottage in the woods of Southern Maine. I wasn’t sure he would join me. I wasn’t sure we were ready for that kind of time together. The previous few years had been full of drama, from moments that seemed to tear us apart for good, followed by […]