my letter to you I woke up to an e-mail message informing me of a new Bruce Springsteen record–always good news. The introductory single gave me both the title for my post tonight and a lift in my spirits. ‘neath a crowd of mongrel trees I pulled that bothersome thread got down on my knees…
When I worked at the Roobar restaurant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, I learned how to make a marinara sauce from Tim Miller, the executive chef and one of the best people I ever worked for. I learned a lot of things from him. One summer Saturday after we moved to Durham, North Carolina, I came home…
distance learning the word distance has its roots in discord and disagreement another way of saying something has come between us we stand apart before we masked and measured ourselves the strife simmered under our skins we want to blame the virus but our disease runs deeper long ago we learned to live at extremes…
My friend Nathan Brown is a poet. For a living. And he’s good. At the beginning of the pandemic, he began something called the Fire Pit Sessions on his Facebook page, which grew out of his invitation for people to commission poems about life in these days. He then began to come on every night…
August 3 marks seven years since my father died—on the same day that Gracie, our little goofy Schnauzer, died as well. the third of august the thing I never really liked about august is the way the heat and humidity ride under my skin making it all but impossible to be comfortable I can move…
I preached this week for our church. The passage was Matthew 14:13-24—the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand—which is one of my favorites. Since our sanctuary is not air conditioned, we filmed in Ginger’s office. One of the songs that was popular when I was in high school that has managed to stick…
opening day my baseball career consisted of afternoon tosses with my father and my brother in the backyard of several houses in several cities being a missionary kid meant I moved like a mediocre minor leaguer hoping for a big break those afternoons of overthrows and near misses taught me to love the game from…
When my parents married, they knew they were moving to Africa less than a year later. My father did not have much when it came to family. His mother died a month after he was born and his father was an itinerant minister and church planter, so his grandmother, Ma, raised him. His father remarried…
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to evaluate the political bands that have connected them with another, and to assess their place among the other countries of the earth, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare how the principles of their founding…
I know. It’s been a while. It’s not so much that I have had nothing to say as I have felt it was not my time to speak. I needed to listen and learn. I needed to help amplify voices that were speaking to me. Teaching me. Inviting me to a larger, more loving world….