Spirituality

Religion and Life

  • While playing golf yesterday, someone asked if I was playing my little homemade golf course. I said, “No, I just take care of it, mow it, water it, kind of like a garden, a hobby. Just like my wife Karen, who works in her garden beside the 8th tee box. We work together at different…

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  • Icebergs in Corn Fields

    When Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s sings “Heaven is a place on earth” I stop whatever I’m doing and sing along. ‘Ooh baby do you know what that’s worth, you make heaven a place on earth’ It happened today, in my truck while driving to Tulsa and a blue-haired lady with a handicap sign hanging…

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  • Reading to my Children

    I’m a lousy Dad. At least it feels that way sometimes, the feeling you get that you didn’t say enough or share enough or that you put on a mask and didn’t reveal your inner self to your children, that they never really “found you out.” And maybe that’s best, because as my wife often…

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  • I stood in the tiny foyer of the holy of holies two days ago, the old knotty pine auditorium of the Tabernacle church of Christ, remembering my wedding day, June 15, 1985, and Thom Mason is fidgeting and pacing, preparing to walk down the aisle and give away his daughter Karen to the likes of…

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  • Thursday was wild card day so we chose a city of interest between Friday’s Berlin walk-about and Rothenburg. Martin Luther is a famous catalyst for the Protestant reformation and in the year 1517 he posted 95 reasons why indulgences, buying and selling absolution for sins, was contrary to the standard of sola scriptura, or by…

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  • After breakfast we opened the French doors as a breeze gently entered our room off sun-drenched Lake Alster. Just as a breeze blew in on Pentecost in the book of Acts. Just as that same breeze ripples through the lives of my family in a non-coercive way. Gently, hopefully, faithfully, lovely. I listened to my…

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  • The Color of God

    The bus crossed the 7th street bridge and I peered over the rail through an open window at the eddies of a muddy river, swirling coffee relentlessly shaping the bank of naked earth. On my first day of junior high ringing bells punctuated my hourly class schedule. This change in my academic life assaulted my…

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  • I grew up in a home that severely limited my creative outlet of language…I wasn’t allowed to curse, nor was I given the freedom to vent with words that hinted of the real four-letter curse words, the baby curse words like heck and shoot and darn. These were deemed unpolished and tainted by the very…

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  • Once in my youth, I felt heaven unreachable, sterile, a place of thou shalt not have fun, and my fervor was not equal to the pill-box hatted lady sitting in the pew in front of me blocking my view of a preacher imploring me to get right and ready to go home. Since I didn’t…

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  • The Best Shortstop I Ever Saw

    A Gatorade cooler dumped on my head moment of clarity regarding my diminishing skills as a shortstop happened one summer evening in the hole between short and third as I reached down across my body for a grounder and caught a bit of dirt and air turning a routine out into a single. I turned and…

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