just enough light

So what does it mean to be ordinary?  Being ordinary does not mean being mediocre.  It doesn’t mean we give up developing our skills, our competencies, our gifts as much as we can.  It doesn’t mean we settle for less than we are capable of.  We can still strive, practice, hope, and work at developing […]

Four squirmy boys, smelly from two days in the car, grew suddenly quiet as the sedan entered the woods.  My brothers and I craned our necks from the back seat, trying to see beyond the next curve in the winding dirt road barely wide enough for Dad to maneuver the car among giant pines. The […]

Judy and the kids were out of town for a few days.  The evenings and the coming weekend were my own.  Unless an emergency arose, I had no one else’s needs to consider in deciding what to do with my time.  After spending a few quiet evenings, I decided to take on a project for […]

During spring break a few years back, my family and I spent a few days over at Turkey Run State Park in Indiana.  One afternoon, we decided to drive around that area just to look at the countryside, see a few covered bridges and whatever else we might discover.  Judy commented that she had read […]

A few years back, during a visit to Austin, Texas, I spied a historical marker on the side of downtown building.  I walked over to it and read these words:  “On this site in 1897 nothing happened.”  I smiled and went on my way, but it caused me to think.  I suspect that indeed something […]

I went to a reunion of a group of 30-somethings who had been the teenagers in the church where I had been the youth minister.  It was exhilarating and humbling to see these people after almost 20 years.  We had grown up together.  Though I was supposedly their “leader”, I was only a few years […]

We must give up the idea that we have to be right and that others therefore have to be wrong. We must embrace the idea that we each have something to learn from the other, even the other who is so different we get scared. It also requires that we keep our mouth shut until we have heard the other person fully and clearly rather than jumping in as soon as we have formulated a rebuttal.

When you have a group advocating one narrow perspective on history, a lot of influential people and a lot of important views get downplayed or eliminated, a lot of important history gets ignored. By eliminating from the curriculum an exploration of “institutional racism”, the school board has presented us all with a crystal clear example of it.

This is not just a criticism of the Tea Party Express. A liberal Democratic rally would have been the same. Democrats would have made the same sweeping generalizations that the tea partiers made. They would have gone for the same cheap applause. They would have invoked the same God to support their causes. But, when we trot God out as a supporter of our personal causes, we reveal how small our faith really is.

The noise and hostility, at least in part, appears to be those of us who have always been in charge now fearing that we are losing or have already lost the privileges that come with being in charge.