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…
Life lessons from a red service station truck and the fade to pink
From 1957 until he retired, my Pop owned and operated a service station in Meridian, Miss. That occupation, life work and calling were scripted for him by the economic reality that he and most of his seven brothers left school…