My heart jumped into my mouth as my adult son, Doug, began to unwrap the baseball supplies he had purchased for his son, Harris, ahead of the beginning of his first T-ball season. Spilling from the plastic bags were tiny…
Where’s right field?
It remains one of the best illustrations I know of the Peter Principle (that one rises to the level of one’s highest incompetency); certainly, it is a great picture of that section at the bottom of the job description of…
On the dangers of renting God
As Janice and I drive down Shell Road near our home in Georgetown, Texas, we routinely pass businesses with their attendant advertising signs. Although I tend to ignore them, there is one sign I just cannot disregard. Five minutes from…
Sacramental pizza
For my first venture out of the house after surgery, Janice decided that, despite my mobility restrictions, we should go to Costco. So, she shopped while I stood in line, ordering lunch — Costco’s famous cheap hot dogs. By the…
Me and my multicultural medical procedure
I am not accustomed to discussing publicly my personal health on the internet (or most anywhere else), but in this case, I am going to make an exception and do just that. When Janice and I returned to the United…
Thoughts on crossing the threshold to a new year
When I was a boy, it happened every New Year’s morning. My father would wake me up early and we would get in his truck and set out to meet most of his seven brothers for coffee and conversation at…
Four feet, two skates
I don’t think it was Christmastime. Too many years have passed for me to be sure. But I do remember it was cold outside. I was walking from the Stephen Center, the Christian diner operated as a ministry in Tirana,…
What I learned when I got lifted up on high
At “dark thirty,” too early for a vacation morning, we waited in the chilly pre-dawn air just outside our cave hotel room in Cappadocia, Turkey. Long before the sunrise, a nondescript white van eventually would come to pick us up…
‘Leave that boy alone; he’s at Grandaddy’s house!’
At 3 a.m. in the dark of the morning of June 14, 1954, William Emmitt Newell, my grandfather, stirred from his usual sound sleep. “Is it time to go to church, Momma?” he asked his wife, Lela Kittrell Newell, mother…
Tombstones or steppingstones?
On holiday in the southwest coastal and midlands regions of England, we visited the small village of Lyndhurst, still known as the capital of The New Forest, because William the Conqueror established the area as a royal hunting ground back…
Making a covenant with aging parents
In early April 1996, occasioned by my mother’s declining health and her most recent fall, resulting in a broken hip, she and Pop decided the time had arrived for them to move from the only house they ever had owned…
Do all the birds on Jaybird Street really want to hear all that tweet, tweet, tweet?
Some of us can still remember song lyrics from our teen years. We may forget what we were seeking when we opened the refrigerator door, the exact dates of our children’s birthdays, or why we went into the garage, but…