The excitement about the big raffle being held this year shouldn’t have taken me by surprise. Yet it did. There was some buzz about these tickets online. Yes, we live in a small rural community. But many of our locals…
Donald Trump is not the kind of star he thinks he is
Donald Trump did not appear at his trial in New York City, where he was accused of raping and defaming author E. Jean Carroll. He did testify under oath, however, in a deposition with Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, at Mar-a-Lago…
Why did it take 20 years to learn my most far-reaching life lesson?
How does a moment morph from repeatably mundane to irreversibly transformative? That question has echoed through my mind countless times across more than 46 years — since an unrecorded lecture in an unremarkable classroom on an otherwise unmemorable autumn morning…
Finding ways to speak up when it’s a Whisper Wednesday: Lessons from the meek
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” is a Beatitude that has held a special place in my heart. I always have been a soft-spoken, shy girl. I sit at the front of the classroom to get…
CNN’s disastrous platforming of Donald Trump
“CNN’s New Hampshire town hall with Donald Trump last night may have done more to boost his chances of winning the GOP presidential nomination than anything that’s happened since the 2020 election.” That was Politico Playbook’s substantive conclusion this morning. It’s…
Her church
I haven’t been able to get the book Her Country by Marissa Moss out of my brain since reading the “State of Women in Baptist Life,” released in 2022. The book explores the decline of women on country radio through…
The Bible is a tool, not a weapon
A few weeks ago in one of our Wednesday evening worship gatherings, I told the story of an episode I watched of the TV show “Criminal Minds.” It opened with a car pulled off onto the shoulder of a road…
A meditation on death
My sister-in-law Faye died this weekend after a long and debilitating chronic illness. Not surprisingly, her husband of 60-plus years wondered why God allowed her to suffer. I don’t think God did. I don’t think God causes, allows or wills…
Live by the mouth, die by the mouth
There’s no disputing Donald Trump is the all-time champion mouth. He used his mouth to get elected president of the United States. Now, his mouth has been the primary culprit in a New York jury finding him liable for battery…
‘We have no king but Caesar’
Experience, circumstances and rereading Scripture often gives us a fresh look at very familiar biblical passages. One such passage from John 19:15 appeared in the expanded text from a recent Bible study lesson: “They therefore cried out, ‘Away with him,…
Best be prepared: The antidisestablishmentarians are coming for our consciences!
Remember the word we often heard at elementary school spelling bees — “antidisestablishmentarianism” — said to be the longest word in the English language? Well, it isn’t, not anymore. That honor now belongs to “acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene,” defined as “a tough rigid…
Loneliness is killing us
What more can we say of loneliness, the disease that afflicts modern Americans from depressed children to isolated elders? We know many of the causes: social disconnection, the decline of community institutions, the radical individualism we often mistake for personal…