Next Sunday, people in the United States will wish Easter felt like it did three years ago. They will put on new shoes and wonder if they should have gotten a half size larger. They will consider going out for…
A thief strikes Bubba-Doo’s
Have you ever walked into a place, read the room and known instantly that something was off? A stop by my favorite old country store the other day was one of those times. I stepped through the door and could…
Pastor’s wife felt the prompt of the Spirit, now she’s the First Lady’s prayer partner
In 2020, Robin Jackson took a leap of faith that has changed her schedule every Wednesday since. During the presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, attended Brookland Baptist Church of West Columbia, S.C., where Jackson’s husband, Charles,…
On this date 85 years ago, the worst school tragedy in American history occurred
On Thursday afternoon, March 18, 1937, in the Texas oil boom town of New London, 694 students and 40 teachers awaited the dismissal bell and the start of a special three-day weekend. Then at 3:17 p.m., just 13 minutes before…
A pediatric chaplain offers five tips for talking with children about death and loss
Beneath the intensity of the fluorescent lights, the pediatric intensive care unit felt even more garish at 3 a.m. as I stood in the hallway with a patient’s dad who was tearful and afraid. His daughter’s nurse had called me…
What Abraham Lincoln has to say about our national grief this Presidents Day
This month, 160 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was ensconced in grief. The Civil War frustrated and hounded him 24 hours a day. Too many young boy-soldiers were dying; too many mothers and fathers were grieving. Gen. George McClellan was not…
A dose of clinical grief from Stumpy at Bubba-Doo’s
I had a day off, so I went up the highway a bit. You may remember previous visits I took to Bubba-Doo’s in this column. It’s an old mom-pop gas station with a store that boasts the world’s best hamburger….
Is it time for another Gettysburg Address?
Our nation lives in suspended grief over 900,000 dead from COVID. Every day we go to the funeral home, the graveyard. Every day the bells toll for those who keep dying from COVID. Where are words of comfort? Is there…
One year after Jan. 6, some things are worth dividing over
In his classic work Why I Am a Christian, the late Anglican theologian John Stott prophetically penned gloomy words that, at the time, mostly fell on deaf ears. “The technocratic society, which diminishes and even destroys transcendence and significance,” Stott…