Seems like only yesterday when someone hauled my scrawny mind to the first grade, singing “School days, school days, dear old Golden Rule days…” That’s when we all got our first Coca-Cola ruler with the Golden Rule written on it. Not only was I exposed to “reading and ‘riting and ‘rithmetic”, but learning how to do unto others as you would want others to do unto you. Radical thought. Education is risky business. Remember the adage “What they don’t know won’t hurt them”; the converse of that oversimplification might also apply. The process of learning is […]
Here Be Dragons
Sometimes I depend on the handwriting on the walls to get my bearings each day. We have a clock that shines its information on our ceiling each night, giving us the time, the temperatures inside and outside. Those are important pieces of information to help me get my bearings as I go to sleep and when I wake. Smelling the coffee sets off a cozy perspective that the divine has come down from heaven to our kitchen, and all is right with the world. So far. But then I read the newspaper, and everything goes […]
To Kill a Mockingbird
The only gun I own these days is a dead one. It’s old and rusty and hangs on the wall in my study with a rose in the barrel. Walmart doesn’t carry the ammunition for guns used in the recent war of northern aggression. In its day it did a lot of damage for a lost cause for which so many gave the last full measure of devotion and from which so many today will not get over. So the century and a half year old Springfield just hangs there passively remembering those dark days of […]
Shall We Dance?
Way back in my childhood hometown’s quest to understand God and the religions of the world, the only real question that needed an answer from the Almighty was: Can Baptist dance? Obvious answer was…some can and some can’t! Of course, they spent their youth groups figuring out just how dancing would lead down that slippery slope to sloppier sins that would give God hissy fits. Dancers turn up in the strangest places in scripture. In Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of Israel’s return and restoration: Then shall the maidens rejoice in the dance, and the young men […]