It would be great if life were all sunshine and rainbows, but it is not. While I enjoy being around upbeat people, I also need to be around some folks who are real and admit they struggle with things like I do. Their honesty lets me know I am not… Continue reading
The county fair is a rite of passage for the summer, and I can’t think of anything that is more Americana. It harkens back to a day when counties were predominantly rural. Local farmers brought their very best calves, pigs, and chickens to be judged. Others showcased their produce or… Continue reading
These words sound like an oxymoron. How can you give what you did not receive? To understand, we need to look back into our formative years. Our parents got some things right, but they also got some things wrong. There were gaps in our parenting, maybe some gaping holes. Maybe… Continue reading
I am a southerner at heart. Maybe, even a beach bum. Though we have spent most of our lives in northwestern Missouri, central Illinois, and especially northeastern Illinois, near Lake Michigan on the Wisconsin state line, we love the south and have visited many times. Now we live here. Don’t… Continue reading
Since this post seemed to several people last year, I am reposting it here. Christmas 1981 The news hit us hard. Everything in our busy lives faded from our minds as our thoughts were consumed with one new haunting fact. Patty had a large tumor that required a hysterectomy. She was… Continue reading
It was a pretty fall day, and I had made a vow to myself and my wife to get out and explore our new home, i.e., the Cumberland Mountains. Somewhere in my internet searches for interesting attractions, I ran across Elrod Falls. It was forty-two miles away. Was it worth… Continue reading
I am not from here. About a quarter of my life was spent in northwest Missouri having grown up in St. Joseph. After that we moved to a bedroom town near Kansas City, Missouri (and I can’t help but remain a Chiefs’ fan). Lastly, we wound up in Illinois. First… Continue reading
I know I have been writing a lot about my health issues lately. But writers often write about something in the realm of their personal experience. Health issues have been an unexpected part of my personal experience lately, first orthopedic and then cardiac. I have enjoyed a remarkable lack of… Continue reading
I’m still waiting to get an appointment with a cardiologist. It has been three weeks after I was told that I have some real issues in that department. Certainly, there are some good things about medical care in this country. We probably have some of the best and most advanced… Continue reading
This post is a bit self-indulgent, but I needed to write it for me (and maybe for you or someone else who reads it.) I am seventy-one years old and have been blessed with good health. Finally, the “check engine” light came on. Chronic joint and muscle pain have been… Continue reading
There must be a little dirt in my blood, more specially, clay. It sounds like a cardiovascular nightmare, but the point is I have always liked dirt track racing. When I was a kid, my parents frequented the local track at a nearby town in Northwest Missouri. When we moved… Continue reading
I got my first Tennessee speeding ticket yesterday. I was doing 73 in a 55 zone on 25E south of town. It’s my wife’s fault for buying a red car. I like my seat back and my steering wheel low. Unfortunately, the wheel position obscured the speedometer. On my car… Continue reading
This post is intended for both local readers and those who live elsewhere. Barn at the end of my street I have lived in Tennessee a little over two months. That’s not very long, especially since so many people I have talked to have lived here all their life. But… Continue reading
Sometimes it seems like life never changes. Each new day is eerily like the one before. But occasionally, there is a huge change, and we know it is the beginning of a whole new chapter. There are a lot of pages in a book, but only a few chapters and you… Continue reading
That’s what my physical therapist asked me the other day. I think most of you know we have moved from Northeastern Illinois to Northeastern Tennessee. It took a toll. Here is my best advice: Don’t. Don’t move unless you have really good reasons to do so. You cannot imagine everything… Continue reading
I literally hobbled into the hotel in Lafayette, Indianna at midnight. We had to be out of our old home and wanted to get a few miles down the road toward our new home. We never dreamed we would be so late. There we were nearly 200 miles from our… Continue reading
When I let one of our neighbors know we were moving, he replied,” That’s one of the biggest pains there is.” I replied, “I am looking forward to it, but then we have lived in this house for twenty-seven years, so maybe I forgot what it is like.” That is one of the most profound things I have ever uttered. Continue reading
Music is an important part of my life. I like listening to it, watching it being played, and playing along with it; sometimes loud. It is a language of the soul beyond words, even poetry. It gets us moving, thinking, and most of all, feeling. It takes us back to… Continue reading
Twenty-seven years ago, we needed to relocate to accommodate my mother-in-law who was moving in with us. By then we had lived in the far north suburbs of Chicago for about five years. We had narrowed down our potential home to one of three options. I am sitting in the… Continue reading
Kenosha, Wisconsin is ten minutes from our home in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois. Since Winthrop Harbor is a bedroom town to Chicago, it has limited offerings for shopping and dining. So, Kenosha has been “our city” for nearly thirty years. Kenosha (“Keno”) was a manufacturing and shipping center and, in the… Continue reading
About two and half years ago our long-haired Chihuahua died. He was an incredibly sweet little guy. He defied the breed stereotype by being a mellow cuddler who loved belly rubs. I never cared for small dogs, until we got him. I wound up loving him more than any dog… Continue reading
I am not a game person. They seem like a waste of mental energy and pointless competition. But I have some exceptions. I like the interaction that games encourage. You get to let your hair down and have some fun with people. Scrabble has some appeal because at least you… Continue reading
That’s a photo of my new baby. I have four others. So, you must think I am a good guitarist or play in a band. Nope. I just play for me. However, it would be fun to play in a band. In a sense I do play in a band… Continue reading
This post has nothing to do with atmospheric conditions or skin care. It is a reflection about our trips around the sun. Tomorrow I will celebrate 71 of them. I am not fishing for birthday wishes of happiness and joy (though always appreciated). Rather, I am using it as an… Continue reading
I had planned to write a tribute to my Chiefs while basking in the warm glow of victory. Instead, I am writing to process my grief. I never really thought about the Chiefs losing after their victorious season of generally doing just enough to win game after game. I didn’t… Continue reading
It’s time for us to do a final clean out of our house before we meet with our realtor March 1st and put our home of twenty-five years on the market in early April. Fortunately, we also did some of this last fall knowing this time was coming. We have gotten… Continue reading
If necessity is the mother of invention, then desperation is the mother of writing. The desperation is the need to understand our own hearts and minds. Stating things so another can understand is a key component of our own understanding. That’s the cathartic element of writing non-fiction. The human spirit… Continue reading
Christmas 1981 The news hit us hard. Everything in our busy lives faded from our minds as our thoughts were consumed with one new haunting fact. Patty had a large tumor that required a hysterectomy. She was twenty-five. We got married very young. Patty was only eighteen. I was all… Continue reading
I have been wanting to write about this for so long that I am now only two months from turning 7 – One. I remember the milestone birthdays, 40, 50, 60, 70, especially seventy, though 50 was interesting, since it was at Chucky Cheese. When I was a kid, if… Continue reading
About 300,000 people move out of Illinois every year, for a net loss of 116,000. We are moving out of Illinois. About 226, 000 people move to Tennessee every year. The net gain is 43,000. We are moving to Tennessee. I have a few people to “blame” for this: My… Continue reading
It is so easy to enumerate what I am done with when it comes to religion. It is profoundly more difficult to figure out what to hang onto. I feel like I should occasionally ask myself that question to see if I am total heretic or just a free spirit. … Continue reading
I feel like I need to write a disclaimer every time I write a post that is critical of the institutional church. I write about my experience over several decades, both very much inside the church and outside of it. I am not mad at anybody. There are no “sour… Continue reading
This is one of the easiest and most cathartic posts I have ever written. It’s easy because I can clearly catalog the characteristics of evangelical religion that are distasteful to me. Since I write this at the peak fervor of our presidential campaign, Evangelical entanglement with politics immediately comes to… Continue reading
It has been a long while since I have posted here and I have missed it. I realize that my readers come from different perspectives and some of the posts I put up are not exactly their cup of tea. A long time ago, I went through my social media… Continue reading
Finally, a little time to think, and pray. God made an unassuming entrance into our little world. The creator became the creation. You would think his entrance would have been grandiose. Instead, it was humiliating. He was born into a blue color, working class family. It was a really bad… Continue reading
John 20-21 Each mealtime has a special feeling to it. Breakfast is refreshing because it has been a long time since dinner. In our day, many people skip it or eat a pop tart on the way to work. Almost never does someone fix breakfast for you. So, when we have… Continue reading
I have been blessed with good health and hardly ever get ill. Now that I am an old man, some things don’t work quite as good as they used to, but I really don’t have anything to complain about. I don’t have any of the chronic conditions that many of… Continue reading
“Follower of Jesus” is the new cooler way to say “Christian”, a word loaded with centuries of baggage that no longer seems very Christian. Yet, “follower of Jesus” sounds a little smug to me. It reminds of those church-goers in ancient Corinth who weren’t in the camp of Paul or… Continue reading
A few years ago, I was having some back pain, so the doctor ordered some x-rays. A couple of days later someone from his office who was probably about the age of my favorite sweater called to inform I had osteo arthritis. I was taken aback by this news and… Continue reading
It was nearly a half of a year ago when my cousin reminded me of the “Prayer of St. Francis.” Lately, I have been reading it over nearly every day. A monk from the thirteenth century penned something so counter intuitive, so aspirational, so challenging, that I wonder if I… Continue reading
The Christmas Letter is something I don’t recall ever coming across until we moved to this area about twenty-five years ago. It basically is a way to stay in touch with folks we have encountered through our life and relay to them on what has been happening over the last… Continue reading
My brother died of Covid December 29th, 2020. Because of the pandemic, we just held his memorial service back in Missouri last Thursday. Bill was 72, five years older than me. He was not in good health and resided in a nursing home. Yet, this disease that has taken hundreds… Continue reading
Saw this somewhere and decided to take the challenge. Jesus. Christianity is based on Jesus, not a church or a prescribed set of beliefs. Love. Christianity is based on love, loving God, loving others (especially those we do not understand), and loving ourselves (in a healthy, non-arrogant sort of way,… Continue reading
It doesn’t feel like Christmas to me. It’s hard to say why, since emotions can be hard to figure out, but it is safe to say some of these things have had an effect on me an many others. Covid has cancelled all festive events; for many it has had… Continue reading
Every year when Christmas rolls around, I feel like I should feel something; something warm and cozy that evokes a sense of joy, gratitude, and peace. Usually, things are just too busy for me to get around to that until very late in the season. There are those moments late… Continue reading
Kenosha, Wisconsin (pop.100,164, about 150,000 with suburbs)) is our nearest city at about 10 minutes away. We are there several times a week. It was a manufacturing city that has successfully re-invented itself as a distribution center and tourist destination. It’s growing. The downtown is rapidly redeveloping and the Lake… Continue reading
I’m a t-shirt, shorts, flip flop, beach sort of guy who likes it toasty outside and air-conditioned inside. This summer has miraculously come through. That’s downright rare to have consistently warm weather here in the upper Midwest on the shores of Lake Michigan. What a wonderful gift in the midst… Continue reading
It’s demoralizing when you take a step in good faith only to find out that it was a mistake and then realize that we need to change your route. That’s where hundreds of thousands of people have found themselves in relationship to their faith and the institutional church. So, I… Continue reading
Today will be a departure from the COVID pandemic of disease, information, misinformation, varied projections, confusing advice, and conspiracy theories. Instead, I want to talk about my gallbladder. Hold on there, partner! Don’t skip to the next marvelous insight from the internet because much wisdom came from my encounter with… Continue reading
Ever notice how the cows all face the same direction in the pasture, but there is one that didn’t seem to get the memo and is separate from the herd doing his own thing? That’s me. I dislike housing tracts where the nearly identical a dwellings are crammed in close… Continue reading
