When people ask me what I think about hell, I have a very limited repertoire of images and anecdotes. My favorites is to clump a lot of my bad memories about Easter into how that first day in hell would be spent. It would begin with the proverbial sunrise service in the high school gym [due to rain on the football field] with the junior high band playing “Up from the Grave He Arose!” This would be followed by a men’s breakfast in the church kitchen with sordid stories from their worst Easters ever. You would move to the morning […]
Tidying Our Faith
British scientist, Richard Dawkins, and I have always felt that “it was so thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happened to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.” It’s how Jesus turned out to be Jewish, and that’s how I ended up being a Presbyterian in the middle of Mississippi nearly eight decades ago. For good or ill, we have inherited our faith from our families over generations simply by circumstance of our birth. If you were able to climb up each limb of the family […]
The Waiting Game
Long before the advent of the corona virus into our lives a few months ago, we found ourselves forever waiting. In the express lane of the grocery store or at long traffic lights. At the doctor’s office we learn the meaning of being a “patient”. We call the insurance company to ask a simple question, manage to work our way through the maze of call options with their series of numbers to punch only to receive a recording that “all of the available agents are busy with other customers…but don’t hang up because your call is important to us. Your […]
Food, Water & Ammunition
The current concerns over the pandemic COVID-19 virus along with the consequential economic downturns and shutdowns, have begun to rattle our nerves and undermine our faith and hope in the future. It’s been eye-opening to see how human beings begin to hoard stuff at times like this in a frenzy akin to life-boat mentality. Over my limited lifespan, I have encountered several times when the world was expected to come to an end, beginning with the threat of nuclear war in the 1950’s when bomb shelters were popular in many backyards and stocked with cans of c-rations. Most […]
Under the Circumstances
They are all around us. As obvious as the nose on your face. Like the sky above us, we all live “under the circumstances”. Why, just in the last few weeks, circumstances seem to be in a tailspin. The coronavirus outbreak, the stock market plunge, the end of our twenty-year war in Afghanistan, and the upcoming elections. Underneath all these obvious changes, the climate keeps changing for the worse, the population keeps expanding and refugees can’t find a home. Speaking of refugees, Jesus lived his life under such circumstances. He knew them and accepted them for what […]
There Must Be a Mistake
For some people that phrase is a simple declaration; for others it’s an imperative with a great big exclamation point at the end! There are people who, for whatever reasons, feel constrained to meander through the maze of daily life looking for the flaws. They read books primarily to find a typographical error or a dangling participle before they can get to the pure enjoyment of reading. Of course, there are people in our society for whom this critical attitude is part and parcel of their vocation. Umpires are there to call ’em as they see ’em. The state trooper […]
What Would Jesus Do?
Though the story seems apocryphal, it carries its own veracity when you have heard it out. It comes out of the soul and psyche of the Southern church in its heyday of racial unrest some half a century back. Like many of its ilk, a certain genteel congregation in a large Mississippi Delta city was struggling with the issue of admitting “people of color” into their morning worship services. In spite of the signs in front proclaiming “Everybody Welcomed” and hymns intoning, “We are not divided all one body we”, this predicament straddled denominational lines […]
The Christian Thing
In Anthony Trollope’s novel written in the early 1860’s, entitled Framley Parsonage, there is an intriguing passage which describes the way in which one of the characters of the book forgives another: “Of course, Mrs. Grantly forgave Mrs. Proudie all her offenses, and wished her well, and was at peace with her, in the Christian sense of the word, as with all other women. But under this forbearance and meekness, and perhaps, we may say, wholly unconnected with it, there was certainly a current of antagonistic feeling which, in the ordinary unconsidered language of everyday, men and women […]
The Beaten Path
I hold my late father-in-law in high esteem not only for his beautiful first-born daughter, but because he was an avid hiker. After his retirement from a college teaching career, Sam hiked the Appalachian Trail, that ancient foot-beaten corridor that led Native Americans and the early vagabond settlers along the spine of this country’s eastern mountain ranges. People are forever walking where some angels feared to tread and others have forged their way through the wilderness. Robert Frost tempts us to consider the road less travelled, but there just might be some conventional wisdom in staying on the beaten path. […]
The Seat of the Pants
Those of us who are caught up in the struggle to live as Christians find ourselves somewhere in the middle of two styles of operations. There are some who claim that real Christians are those who live “by the Book.” They take the Bible literally as the Christian’s owner’s manual that must be thoroughly studied, stringently obeyed and ardently defended in order to guarantee worry-free miles of living. Others like to fly by the seat of their pants, looking occasionally at the Book but enjoying the scenery and trying to figure out instinctively how to play the situations by ear. […]