He Sustains Me With Raisins

I was feeling pretty discouraged in various ways when I went to bed last night. Partly situational, but a good deal of it was simply being absolutely saturated with listening to all kinds of podcasts and news updates this past week and yesterday, especially. I had over three hours of road time yesterday listening to this stuff, and then last night as I painted, I listened to more. It’s discouraging for a number of reasons. I awoke this morning gearing...

The Fire is Your Friend

One of my FB friends shared something I read tonight and I thought I’d start off with a re-telling of the story he shared. He’s a DJ, and he told the sad story of showing up early for a booked 70th birthday party and no one was at the venue nor was anything set up for the event. He called the client and learned that the person of honor had suddenly passed away a week ago, and everyone was at...

“GETTING” The Passover

There’s been a lot of talk since Superbowl Sunday about foot washing. Images of a Marxist utopia abound in the “He Gets Us” ad campaign which imported a specific, singular act found in scripture into the movement’s re-contextualization/agenda.I think we need to better understand the specifics of context found in scripture in order to better evaluate the ad campaign’s messaging. This is my feeble attempt as a layperson to lay the deeper groundwork, as I currently understand. I think we...

An Undivided Heart

Today marks another Valentine’s Day where I (and many others) find themselves in some condition of aloneness in this life–even those who are married may ultimately exist in this state of being for any number of reasons. Today also marks the beginning of Lent–Ash Wednesday. I like the idea of taking something up during Lent rather than giving something up. As I prepared for sleep last night, I thought that perhaps during this Lenten season I should daily take up...

Doves, Bacon and Staying the Course

Provocative titles can make the difference between whether someone wants to read a book, news story or blogpost. I was about to call this Doves, Onions and Staying the Course but if you read on, you will understand why bacon also came into my mind. Anything having to do with bacon may capture one’s attention! Not that this expression is particularly worthy of attention (it is my own musings) but hey, if I’m going to write about something in my...