One summer evening when we lived in Plymouth, my family had opportunity to invite over some dear friends to spend some time swimming in the swimming pool shared by our town house association. Now the family we invited over had five children too most of which were almost identical in age to our children; we also had another thing in common, we were both loud. As we enjoyed the evening in the pool, the children of course were using their “outside…
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module depended. In the movie made to retell the story of the Apollo 13 mission, the mission commander calls all of…
I’ll never forget the time that I was confronted by my pastor for my bad attitude. I’m not sure what I did or said that caused the confrontation, but I was a senior in high school and I remember his asking me to stay behind after some assembly we had and he talked to me about how my attitude was holding me back and that I needed to deal with it. Now how do you suppose I responded? Do you…
Millennial politics is simple, really. Young people support big government, unless it costs any more money. They’re for smaller government, unless budget cuts scratch a program they’ve heard of. They’d like Washington to fix everything, just so long as it doesn’t run anything. Millennials’ political views are, at best, in a stage of constant metamorphosis and, at worst, “totally incoherent,” as Dylan Matthews puts it. a similar survey of Millennial attitudes that offered another smorgasbord of paradoxes: Millennials hate the…
At almost 1,500 feet below sea level, the Dead Sea is the lowest land on the face of the earth. The sea receives water from the Jordan River and several springs around and beneath it, but because it is landlocked, the Dead Sea merely gathers all the water that flows into it. As the water from the Jordan and the springs around it flow to the sea, it gathers minerals from the rocks and land it passes. The most common…
I was once listening to the radio and a very popular preacher who pastored a very large church. He was talking about prayer and nothing he said was wrong or sinful; in fact, I might say some of the same things if I were teaching about prayer. But I don’t think this man was actually preaching at all. His preaching method was to make up some talking points about prayer that he wanted to emphasize and periodically find some Scripture to…
In 2011 the Chicago Cubs hired Theo Epstein to be their president of baseball operations. He came from Boston having led that franchise to two World Series championships and ending what had been the third longest championship drought in Major League Baseball. The Cubs ownership gave Epstein complete control of every baseball decision, and he along with his team proceeded in making the Cubs horrible. In 2012, 2013, and 2014 he traded several of the best most loved players from the…
What will your eulogy say? I once read a eulogy that someone sent me. It was really nice, but it didn’t mention God or Jesus once by name. There were two references to Christ, that the man had accepted Christ and was in the presence of Christ, but no references to faith, believe, or righteousness. The eulogy did mention the fact that this was a great man at least five times. Now is there something backwards here? I think so….
The 1904 Olympic marathon may have been the strangest ever. Of the 32 runners, only five were experienced marathoners; one showed up at the starting line barefoot, and a Cuban runner was attired in a white, long-sleeved shirt, long, dark pants, a beret and a pair of street shoes. One fellow Olympian took pity, found a pair of scissors and cut his trousers at the knee. On August 30 they fired the starting pistol, and the men were off. Heat…