Slowing Our Spirit--Episode 3 on Peace

On September the 8th, our refrigerator gave up the ghost. A nice run of 32 years, only to be killed by a power surge after SCE turned off the power. We found and purchased a new one on 9/10, delivery slated for 9/26. We didn’t care for the long delay, but on 9/23, they pushed it back to 10/1. We figured we could manage, if we had to. Then on 9/28, they changed it once more, to 10/14. We hope and pray that’s the day, but I’ll wager that too will get moved. Honestly…

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Habituated

No, this may not qualify as unusual, but some time back my email account got hacked. A friend forwarded an email he had received “from me,” with a link that obviously wasn’t from me. So, I changed the password that I’d kept for several years (OK, I made some minor, rememberable tweaks) into a longer more exceptional one. MUCH harder to remember. Much harder to hack.

But for the next several weeks, 90% of the times I signed into my email account, I automatically used the old email password. Habits die hard. Before…

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Gold Medals

Exceptionally low self-worth plagued my early years. In elementary school, life lost so much joy I also lost laughter for several months. In high school, primarily only the permanence of suicide kept that from being tried. In college, I learned how to gold medal in competition—with others. No Olympic events, just outdoing others to make myself better. You see, if…

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Smiling Through the Tears

Tears come to us all. They accompany poor health, friction with people, unresolved sins and wrongs, economic hardship, death, floods and fires, culture and politics, the list could go on into eternity. Just one example, my community in SoCal is facing 8 of 10 days with temps over 100, maxing at 109. Three days ago, our power went out in the middle of the day for four hours—luckily we were on our way to the beach. But may we remember that Jesus said troubles come with breathing in John 16:33. His brother James told us…

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But God

Preferring to understand the big picture, I embarked on a mission to comprehend God, vainly hoping the more I understood him and his nature and his essence, the better I could follow. Easier for an ant to assess Einstein. Unable to grasp the core of God in the vast distance between our natures, I drifted—until…

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A Whole New World

On a recent flight to Alaska for the wedding of a good friend, this traveling man received quite a shock. I’ve ridden a motorcycle in all 50 states and flown over most of the contiguous US, and love how an airplane window seat provides a God’s eye view of the world. I traced our trek from San Diego to Seattle over the California coast, Mt. Shasta in NorCal and Crater Lake in Oregon, culminating in Mt. Rainier. But as we left Seattle for Anchorage, something happened that totally rocked my world…

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