It wasn’t until we made it to 2021 that I personally with hindsight recognized or admitted that I was depressed last year like nearly two-thirds of us. Choosing to move into retirement the same month COVID hit helped to shove me into my melancholia

I’m a guy with a mind that wanders…and wonders about stuff. I wonder about all the back stories not written down in scripture. There is way more we don’t know than what we do know—and even what we know is from the writers and many ‘editors’ perspectives, cultures and paradigms.

As young men few of us really realize the vacuum that these father issues leave in our lives.  I suspect that the father hunger (and who of us has had perfect fathers) is intrinsically a part of what creates our longing for God. 

Going east over the big pond you tell yourself you need to sleep.  Good luck.  We'd bought fancy neck pillows...looks like a neck brace...to keep your head up, from falling forward.  Works so, so. This time we found a homeopathic remedy at REI to ward off jet lag..

I got to thinking about BBQ this morning—yes, I probably would eat it for breakfast. I’ve always said that if you slapped some barbecue sauce on it, I’d take a bite of it! (Might be a bit slower to do so these days)

The truth is, there are different realities, different ways of seeing things. Our situation with mom is a microcosm of the world we’re all living in right now. Fed by conspiracy theories and false dogmas, there are many out there living in a different reality than others of us.

When the Bible is used abusively to bludgeon ourselves or others with fear, hate mongering and shame, it has to be addressed and even removed for a season.

Providence and the connections with people over our lifetimes always amazes me.  Were it not for that summer in Iowa and sitting at the Ulmet’s dinner table, I would never have known Linda Snelling Brown.  

I love how life weaves such strings of connection…to design a fabric we never would have dreamed of. 

some sins that were worse, darker than others. You’ve heard of the 'white lie’—not so bad, or the 'hot sins’—those being the sexual ones, the really bad ones. With all the ‘larger’ congregants and materialists around, you knew that gluttony, envy and covetousness weren’t all that bad.

as I’ve aged—and I hope matured some, my thinking regarding all this has shifted. You’ve likely heard the joke about meeting St. Peter (another favorite) in heaven who cautions to speak quietly because that group over there thinks they are the only ones here.

We got her back to bed and called her doctor who said to bring her in first thing.  Having grown up with all boys I was dumb as dirt about pregnancy, periods and such.  Is THIS what pregnant women do? She passed out one more time before we got her to his office around 8 o'clock. 

during one of her speaking visits to Nashville shortly after my mom had passed that she overheard someone asking me about mom. Barb broke in and said: “Well, since your mom has passed and you’re very close to Tim’s age, we should just adopt each other”.

if you did not get things right with God right now, you’d step out the door of the church that night, be hit by ‘that bus’ and ushered into eternal doom and damnation.  So, it made sense to me to go to the altar, get right, and then run in front of the bus!  Pretty fatalistic huh? But I seriously thought that.

I’d even tried drinking some of the hideous homeopathic cures he had tried. And here comes ‘Johnny come lately’ trying to rally our ‘oh, ye of little faith crowd’. Again, I want to knock him from the fifth floor window. Jeff did die that evening.

I’m just sayin’, to have lived a life as a social worker, serving those troubled by multiple situations in their lives, working with those others saw as misfits…or worse, as scum and human trash—took something out of me…but it gave me more.

God's original intent was that the world would sparkle every day...that it would glisten and shine like stained glass windows, crystal bowls and kaleidoscopes.  The grand truth is, the world still does, if you can 'see' it.  And I got the gift of seeing it all through watery eyes...which makes it even more beautiful. 

he emphatically said “take that child you’ve met out for a good time and get reacquainted”.  He knew that part of me thought the whole inner child theory stuff was silly but could see that I had serious concerns for the weekend.  I had always blown off all the inner child talk. 

We, like all bikers, started out on the bikes we'd had (not the one with chrome fenders), but quickly began ratcheting up to better, lighter and more well equipped bikes. I loved it! The previous trips of a few miles became Saturday rides of 60-75 miles.

I’d read the history of how the English treated the Emerald Isle.  They were nasty during the years of what was called the potato famine. It was really a form of genocide.  So, I’d been to Ireland more than once, never England.

We were able to see sections of the trail from the boat particularly one section that traversed the barren slope of the Manono Ridge. From the sea, it looked treacherous as hikers inched along the narrow path on the cliff a couple of hundred feet above the ocean at times meeting another hiker going the opposite direction having to hug each other as they passed.