As a teenager in the 1960’s, one musical theme was young love with all its thrills, excitement, and struggles. Ray Charles sang Georgia On My Mind about a long ago love that haunted relationships of today. The Beatles recorded Michelle and Yesterday about the feelings of a young man in love. First, a young man wondered if he would ever be able to make a young lady […]
I remember my grandparents complaining about the speed of life 60+ years ago. Fans of the movie The Shawshank Redemption will recall Brooks Hatlen being shocked about how fast he found life to be outside prison. After his parole, he wrote to friends still incarcerated inside Shawshank, “The world went and got itself in a big **** hurry.”
Life continues to change at a pace unseen in US […]
Unity is quite the rage in the political realm. On January 20, Ari Shapiro interviewed Mara Liason during the “All Things Considered” NPR radio program. During the dialogue, Mr. Shapiro stated President Biden emphasized a message of unity during his campaign and reiterated the theme during his inaugural address. Shapiro then asked, “Do you think that this message of healing and unity can lead to real […]
In my pre-teen and teen years, many of the men in our home church encouraged me to think about becoming a preacher. That really wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. However, I normally found myself in some leadership role each annual “Youth Sunday.” When I was finally charged with delivering the sermon, I settled on a portion of the sermon on the mount as […]
Today, I want this post to be different. First, we predominantly focus on financial issues, but today let’s look at something more important than money. Second, I want to talk specifically with the men who read. This isn’t sexist, but we need more men to accept a challenge left for us in Scripture. The challenge presented applies to women as well, but I will leave it for […]
Forty-eight years ago, my new bride and I moved onto a college campus outside Knoxville, Tennessee. Set among the hills along the banks of the French Broad River, the beauty of the area and the clarity of the blue sky easily awakened the mind and excited the senses. It was a seemingly ideal location to study and prepare for a life of Christian ministry. Nearly thirty years […]
We can hear the voices of concern, “Confidently charge into the future? With all this uncertainty? How can anyone be confident about the future when France, Germany, and London have all entered month long lockdowns, and COVID infection numbers are on the rise in the USA? How can anyone charge into the future confidently when the supporters of Presidential candidates attack one another with ferocity unremembered from […]
Planning for the future for those in their 50’s may seem easy, but it isn’t! People in this general age group know they NEED to get really serious about their future, but they live in the “land of a 1000 obstacles” to borrow from the title of the 1960’s R&B/Hip-Hop song. There are family demands as children graduate, move into their first career, marry, and buy their […]
Does MY life matter? This question is obviously on the minds of many across the USA and around the world. We can, without equivocation say, “Yes, YOUR life matters to God…and subsequently to many others.” Still, that is getting ahead of ourselves just a bit.
As the Passover celebration in Jerusalem drew closer during the Biblical era, Hebrew people from across the Levante would gather for the celebration. […]
Paradigms are powerful. The Oxford English Dictionary defines them as “a pattern or model.” The word was obscure until Thomas Kuhn used it referring to a set of concepts and practices defining a scientific discipline in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Now, it is popularly used to define how someone looks at anything.
Our personal retirement paradigm is built from our hopes and dreams (what […]