What once was verdant green turns fiery orange, crimson red, then slowly browns to death, unties from living bonds, lets go sustaining branches drifts softly to the ground, lies quiet in the darkened mud among those gone before. All is lost in crumpled mire. Blades and veins and midribs disappear amid the roots, degrade, decline, decay. Soon they are no more, just dirt returning ...
Read More »He wasn’t my favorite teacher. He was intimidating and a tough grader. For a teenager with the kind of learning disabilities that make it difficult to get assignments done, he was more an arch nemesis than a friend. I was also rather lazy and preferred basketball to conjugating verbs. I’d heard crazy stories about him from my older sister. She told of how he prowled the aisles between the de...
Read More »Many years ago I remember telling my friend, Wayne, that he ought not attribute motives to another person. I assured him he couldn’t possibly know what was rattling around in someone else’s head. He acknowledged my rebuke and was repentant. A short while later he confronted me about the comments I had made about someone else’s motives saying, “Aren’t you the one who told me to never attribute moti...
Read More »Grief comes spewing out when you least expect it. A word here. A taste there. A smell. A song. A question. Insignificant, random moments that are suddenly thrust on you and tears flow and your heart is pierced and all the loss comes falling out in a heap in the middle of God knows where. It’s not arrangeable or scheduled. It can’t be forced. It just happens. I was at the doctor for the annua...
Read More »They slowly slip away, one by aging one, limping down alone these ancient saints take little with them but simple, godly hearts and tattered memories. The things they built become decrepit edifices, abandoned now by children’s children and the children after them. Beside decaying paths the old ones slowly fall away. Soon there is no memory, no recollection they were here. The world goes sp...
Read More »Cantilevered prayers, desperate floating cries, secure me to a mighty God through Spirit’s groans, bridging to the Maker who weeps of my collapse. Knowing I can’t stand alone, he spans chasm walls, extends the girders, welds beam to beam with an underpinning love that never lets me go. In the swirling chaos where nothing solid lies, far beneath the seething waves tension and compression war....
Read More »Ruth died. She was my mother’s best friend and the wife of Pete who became something like a dad to us kids after our dad died in 1969. Pete would come over most weekends and do things like fix a leaking faucet or replace a water pump on Mom’s ‘88 Oldsmobile or help Mom with balancing the bank book. It was the stuff of everyday life. Ruth would most often come with him and she and Mom would chat wh...
Read More »Sometimes I’m the ‘clicker’. Somebody has to be the clicker so it might as well be me. The clicker has an important job. It requires some skill. When you’re the clicker timing is everything. You have to be attentive; completely hyper-vigilant. It can be rather exhausting paying that close of attention. It helps to suffer a bit with obsessive compulsive disorder. If you miss a click everything gets...
Read More »He owned the backyard. Or at least he thought he did. He wasn’t the nicest of neighbors. He went to war with any intruder daring to enter his property, driving them all away. An obnoxious defender of territory, he never backed down from a fight. He was certain that the beautiful purple desert sage bush at the far corner of the lawn belonged to him, as did the hummingbird feeder dangling from the p...
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