One of America’s most significant poets, Emily Dickinson, knew a thing or two about words, even though she had no formal education. In a short poem, penned in a letter to her cousin, she capsulized the power of words: “A word is dead when it is said Some say – I say it just begins …
Lori and I have been stuck in traffic for 15 minutes, snailing along, inch by inch. I could ride a tricycle faster than this. My google maps told me this route was three minutes quicker than the one I had planned to take. Three minutes quicker turned into 30 minutes longer. Waiting isn’t easy for …
A friend of mine was trying to tell me how to pray for my wife. “Tell her Satan has no claim on her life,” he emphasized. “Go home, stand on the Word of God, and pray for her healing.” Seeing my raised eyebrows, he explained: “Take a Bible, put it on the floor. Stand on that …
There is a moment, just before surgery, when a pastor can pray with a parishioner. I have no idea how many times, easily hundreds, when I’ve stood next to someone right before they underwent surgery. There is something about that moment just before the anesthesiologist administers the “happy medicine” and the attendants wheel the patient to …
It’s an age-old aphorism: “Things are usually not as bad as they seem or as good as they appear.” In reality, we live most of our lives between the utterly miserable and the indescribably perfect. We get shocked and thrown into a tailspin, but then we regroup, maneuvering through the crags along life’s slippery slopes, …