We had new windows put in our house last week. It’s one of those things that makes sense for the long-haul. The view out of them is similar to what it was before, but there are no more drafts and less mold since the new ones won’t leak. The energy savings will be very helpful, […]
Jack Tookey
Taking God’s View
Accepting someone may require more than just loving them as they are. There are times when accepting and loving someone involves “intervention.” We may need to help them deal with something in their lives that is tearing them up, even though they don’t recognize it. This kind of love plays out in a passage out […]
Learning to Stoop
It was a quiet morning, and I was sitting on my porch, watching a fledgling hawk in the bare branches of a tree in the field. An adult had been near the fledgling for a while, but now had disappeared. As I watched, the fledgling took off and flew up into the air, only to […]
Two Places at Once
My wife and I are in our second season of trying to live in two places at once. When we finished with the first one, we committed ourselves to NEVER do it again. But here we are, once more trying to live in two places at the same time. God has guided her to minister […]
Something to Die For
Last week, I toured a couple of Civil War battlefield sites. They were clean, green, and beautiful, much different than they were the days that made them famous. Antietam was a particularly sobering place to tour. Our guide walked us to several places where ferocious combats were fought, places where thousands of men died. To […]
Surrounded
It’s surprising to most of us how often we are captured on camera nowadays. From surveillance cameras to cellphones to normal videography, we are surrounded, or so it seems. This is increasingly true even in rural areas of our own country. In certain cultures (China, for example), facial recognition has made such scrutiny pervasive, personal, […]
Too Much Information
We’ve all had the experience. We sit down with someone we just met, and in less time than it takes to let our latte cool, we’ve heard their life story. Sometimes the details are more than we want to hear, or other times there are too many names or places or other items with which […]
Most Blessed
Last Wednesday, when I would normally be putting the finishing touches on my weekly post, I was instead participating in a memorial service for Harold Shehan, a man I have grown to love and admire over the last three years. In the clubhouse of the country club where he lived for much of his later […]
Whatever
My daughter was about to do something that I considered somewhat dangerous and perhaps a little foolish. Rather than just tell her she couldn’t do it “because,” I decided to let her go ahead, but offered some fatherly advice in the process. While I spoke with her, she looked at the ground, her fingernails, and […]
Ol’ Reliable
It was a very wintry day in the Midwest. We had over a foot of snow on the ground and the temperature was below zero, with a bitter wind. It was also Sunday, and my mother taught Sunday school, so we needed to get to church! The Mercury station wagon we normally tooled around in […]