All of us sit on a powderkeg of emotions. The worst of all is anger. Anger throws bricks through windows. It speeds up behind another driver, draws a gun, and starts shooting. It slaps a wife, batters children, and burns forests. It holds a keyboard as it types bitter all-cap letters into Twitter or Facebook. Harsh words wound. All are the results [...]
This final week of the year is my annual “review and preview” time. I look at what I have done and then top the hill to look at the year ahead. In the review of the year, one of the vital questions is: What one word or phrase best sums up and describes your experience this year? How would [...]
Our world is deaf. It is not from the inability to hear but the refusal to listen. Shouting. Name-calling. Interruptions. They are all signs of the times. The first presidential debate of 2020 put it onstage in living color. The candidates acted as if they were two third-graders shouting ridicule at each other on the school playground. (I apologize for the insult [...]
Is there a keeper of the spring in your life? Perhaps you need to heed the counsel of a Scottish preacher named Peter Marshall. Marshall had a gift. His Scottish brogue did more than enchant. It allowed him to communicate relevant ideas. His post-war generation was so different, yet so much the same as ours. “The Keeper of the Spring” became one [...]
This is the year I received my official “old-man card” (aka Medicare). It arrived in the trail of gray hair, bifocals, and hearing loss. Such is life when you get to a certain age. The concept of an age at which things change is nothing new. The idea of retirement came from Otto Von Bismarck to rid himself of rivals and control [...]
We lost something when family farms closed, and farm kids went to college. Society changed in more than simple agriculture. We lost a way of thinking. While in college, I was the Sunday preacher for a little church in Noodle, TX. In that church, I got to know a cotton farmer. I learned more about life from him than the graduate courses [...]
“What do I plan to do once authorities lift the shelter-in-place order?” That’s what I ponder now. I find my flights of fancy ever-changing. I start with what I used to do. I would like to leisurely go to a grocery store again and find what I need. I want to sit down at a restaurant of my choice to eat [...]
In this COVID-19 situation, people ask the same question? When. When will the virus be gone? When will our lives return to normal? Will I still have a job? Are restaurants and small businesses going to survive? All are questions longing for certainty. People like certainty. We want to know food is available. They turn to the weatherman on the TV, [...]
Reputations grow around accomplishments. For one man, his reputation is for a single line, which he never spoke. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Henry Morton Stanley led an expedition up the Congo River in 1887. It was his third expedition. It became a disaster. Left alone, his men brutalized the Africans. Those they used for labor they let die from poison food and [...]
When COVID-19 (or as it was called then coronavirus) started rippling the news, I did not sound serious. After all, all media makes money by scaring people to death. I soon grew weary of breathless news anchors prophesying Armageddon. (I always thought that was the realm of end-times evangelicals.) But then, it did start getting serious. Doctors I knew and trusted seemed [...]
