When I was a boy, for some reason Aunt Ruth liked me. Aunt Ruth was, in reality, my father’s aunt, but to the rest of our family, that was her name, and she fit a bit of the Welton mold: she was a strong-minded and strong-willed woman who was fiercely independent and, common to...
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I’ve been pretty fortunate throughout my life. Instead of being born in Liberia or in Croatia or in Palestine, I somehow drew the lucky stick to fall out into this world in the United States. I made the cut to hit the tail end of the 20th century, and I also drew the middle...
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Today was a good day, although it started with the sky so melancholy that it quietly cried for a spell before the sun fully awoke and worked on cheering everyone up. I got up during its sadness and felt fall chill throughout the house and pet the kitties before I headed to church and...
Read more →This morning, I needed to write, and I wasn’t sure about what, so I have sat here looking around in a little coffee shop downtown, across from the UNM campus. It’s a converted house that is loosely filled with mix-and-match tables and chairs. The wood floors are nice. The walls are white or soft...
Read more →“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” ― Theodore Roosevelt Thinking as I do about meaning and purpose and Biblical answers, I’ve wondered a lot about...
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My guess is we all have those moments when it feels like the walls of life are pressing in on us. Or, rather, the walls of being alive press on us. Decisions squeeze us, and choices ask for a decision. Sometimes, it’s the wheeze of mortality heard way to close to us, through a...
Read more →Listening to my country station on Pandora today, this song came on. At first I thought, hmmm, pop- gotta chuck it. But the drums grabbed me, and then the vocals pulled me in. Never heard of Parachute. Wow. Powerful little song.
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I was delighted to see my cousin Kevin Scruggs’s company, Bro Corp United, had this video posted on its Facebook timeline today. Evidently, Terry Bradshaw hosts a show called “Today in America” which is billed as “the first show of its genre… that’s geared towards the educated, affluent viewer… Today in America successfully blends...
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Things were getting a little kooky this afternoon as much of the world (or at least a few people in the U.S., most specifically in Miami and Cleveland) were getting amped about LeBron James and where he would land next year in the NBA. I ended up coming across this tweet that said locals...
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I don’t know what I ate the night before, but Thursday morning I woke from one of those lucid dreams wondering what I had done. The dream, from what I had of it still in memory at the time, went something like this… I’m sitting in a lobby to the training room in an...
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“Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains.” – James 5:7 Growing up as a Southern Baptist kid in the evangelical tradition, I didn’t go to a church that was all...
Read more →No doubt this has been done by someone else out there on the web, but I thought that for my perusal- and for my future reference- I’d jot William Strunk’s rules (with E.B.’s additions) about writing from “The Elements of Style” here. I. ELEMENTARY RULES OF USAGE 1. Form the possessive singular of nouns...
Read more →The theme in the new series that started at church today is “Defining Moments”. It’s a series about Peter the disciple, but today Todd talked about the moments you and I encounter infrequently where we make single decisions that impact the course of our lives. Similarly, I finished Steinbeck’s “The Winter of our Discontent”,...
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On my list of things I hoped to get done this spring/summer/fall/maybe-winter were a few bigger item dealies. I wanted to build and seed a garden box in my backyard (check). I wanted to get screens for all of my-non-screened windows (uh, no). I wanted to put down wood floors in my living room...
Read more →It was 2009 when I came across Somaly Mam’s heartbreaking memoir “The Road of Lost Innocence”, in which she described in detail her traumatic early years after she was taken from her family and village by a “family friend” into a foreign city to be first a slave, and then made a prostitute in...
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