I grew up with a Bible in my hand and big chunks of it systematically planted in my heart and mind. For that, I am grateful. Every sermon I ever heard about the poor, wandering, lost sinner sounded eerily like this: I’m a rollin’ stone all alone and lost For a life of sin, I…
Author: Gene
The Darndest Things – or – the wisdom of the child
“Kids say the darndest things.” You know it. I know it. We love it. Back when he was one of America’s most beloved and cherished comics, Bill Cosby demonstrated this fact in a TV series by that name (it ran 1998 – 2000). Art Linkletter ran the original “Kids Say the Darndest Things” as a…
Where does the time go? ~Putting the Past and the Future into Perspective
“Where does the time go?” An old friend and I were reminiscing not long ago, talking about old times the places we had been and the things we had done together in days long gone. His was a rhetorical question – one that I have asked and heard others ask innumerable times. It is a…
The 60-Year Wedding Anniversary: A Milestone for the Mighty in Love
Tommy and Mary Weir, my in-laws(for 37 years and counting), are celebrating 60 years of marriage this very day. SIXTY! YEARS. This is a milestone not many of us will pass.You gotta get it right if you wanna get it done. To make it 60, you have to marry fairly young and really well and…
Dear Mom, Thanks for the benefit of the doubt
I woke up this morning thinking about my mother…Mom, I call her. I think it was the residual thoughts of a dream I dreamt, but it slipped into the recesses of subconscious and disappeared in the fog of fading memory. I can no longer confirm that I dreamed of her or dreamed at all. At…
A Father’s Day Remembrance: Little Granddad – the dad who almost wasn’t
I have honored the dads in my life just about every year around Father’s Day. My own father, William David Strother, died at age 51, when I was 30 and left a million memories of my childhood and a million more what-ifs behind. My wife’s father, Thomas Henry Weir, now 80 and still spry, still…
A word about truth, perception, and perspective
Truth, perception, and perspective this may be a subject too large to tackle here. Let’s attempt it anyways. I am settling back into the routine of my life following an eventful week that started with the funeral of a 21-year-young lady thedaughter and sister of dear friends taken suddenly and without warning in a tragic…
On the loss of Snowflakes (my complaint against the Right)
One of the Right’s worst moves in recent memory has been to co-opt a perfectly wonderful word – and beautiful feature of Nature – and wield it as a pejorative term. Look, I don’t care for the over-sensitive, safe-space seeking, racial strife-stirring, victims†of everything they don’t like and everyone they disagree with Millennials with…
18…Again – A note to my firstborn on the 18th anniversary of her 18th birthday
A few days ago, my ever-so-curious and talented son-in-law Edward Frys discovered a long-forgotten and deeply buried treasure of floppy disks bearing assorted thing I had written and saved over the years. I had not seen them or anything on them in 15 years or so. Among the digital cobwebs on these vintage computer disks…
Prayer: To Whom are you talking? – a Devotional | Morning Manna
Originally published inMorning Manna THURSDAY, MAY 11, 2000 Prayer: To Whom are you talking? “And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have…