On a cloudy New Year’s Day, I was driving west at sunset, when I saw a little wisp of orange sky linger over some low-lying hills. Rather bored by the drive and pensive about the New Year, I acknowledged the few seconds of light with a slight nod to hope and beauty. “H...
Like other American children, I gathered with my family around the TV set on July 20, 1969, as we huddled close to watch Neil Armstrong take those first steps on the moon. It was the summer after my second-grade year, and we had traveled from our home in Houston to Aus...
While our children are likely quite familiar with the Creation stories from Genesis, I’ll bet that they are less familiar with the stories of the New Creation. Like the Genesis stories, these are also deeply poetic narratives, with imagery that points to the same beaut...
I grew up in the heart of Houston--an expanse of concrete and urban sprawl so vast and wide that it literally takes several hours to cross the city, even without traffic! For me, Houston was best symbolized by the Galleria, an immense three-story shoppers paradise comp...
Have you ever gotten out of your car in the parking lot of a strip mall in an unfamiliar town and forgotten where you are? Our chain stores and restaurants, the road signs and plantings that line the expressways of our nation, all look the same. Even in other countries...
When you and your babies are hungry and thirsty, it’s kind of hard to care much about abstract things, isn't it? I can picture the people of Israel out in the desert, after their dramatic escape from Pharaoh and lives of slavery in Egypt. They are tired and out of sort...
In my family, we tell the story that my sister's first words were a loud and firm, “Me! Mine!” I think that her language must have had something to do with living with a bossy older brother. Given our innate human drive to possess, though, I imagine that she is not the...
Often, when we think of the biblical commandment to “keep the Sabbath,” our imaginations are full of the movies and novels that portray the dull Sundays of the past, where hours were spent sitting on hard benches in church and then in boring conversations about the wea...
We Christians sometimes seem to think that Jesus spent most of his time fussing about sex and marriage, but he didn’t. What he really wanted to teach us about, according to the New Testament, is our money and possessions! In Matthew 6, we have some of Jesus’ most well-...
