The Graphics of Life

I walked into church today and found out that there was no one to teach the children's Sunday School class. Y'all, if you knew the week I had, and the Saturday that followed, you'd know that teaching children was just about the absolute last thing I wanted to do. My nerves were shot and I needed to be taught, not teach, but no one else was stepping up to do it and the kids couldn't be left on their own. So, I roped a friend into helping with "crowd control" and off we went. As I headed up the stairs to the classroom, I wondered what we were going to teach them. I wondered what I was going to say. I wondered how I would react when they refused to listen or follow instructions. I struggle on a normal day to handle it when kids don't listen, but today? When my nerves were gone. What was God thinking??? Why was there no one else willing to take care of the situation??? I'll admit, my friend tried and did a good job reading the lesson that was next in th...

  The Power of Perspective by L.D. Kirklin Auto Focus There are days when I think I missed my calling as a magician. You see, I have an uncanny ability to make my focus disappear. All I need to do is start a project with the intent to finish it directly, and POOF, my focus is gone! What? Wait! It was just here! How did I do that? Where did it go? … and more importantly, how do I get it back? For as long as I can remember, focus has always been a challenge for me. I remember sitting in elementary school, terrified because the teacher said we had to read along as she read aloud and be ready to read if she called on us. As a kid, I couldn’t even understand, let alone properly articulate, my inability to accomplish that task. My brain simply could not focus and process as the teacher expected. She would start reading and my brain would hear words that made connections with other thoughts. Before I knew it, I had written an entirely different story in my head than the one the teac...

It’s Just One More Thing The other day, a friend mentioned a new, unwanted challenge that recently showed up in her life. I listened to the details, and, after being sympathetic to her plight, me being me, I offered some logical and encouraging responses. After hearing me out, she paused and then said, “yeah, but it’s just one more thing.” At first her reply struck me funny. It was obvious that she had no choice but to agree with my responses. She realized they were logical, and she knew that any attempt to argue against them would be futile. At second thought however, her response spoke deeply to me, and, in truth, stomped heavily on my toes. Years ago, while working as a junior computer consultant, I was tasked with an extensive inventory project. Assigned to consult with the school district of Philadelphia, I had to take a detailed inventory of their facilities department so my company could implement new software to help manage their cost and materials. Even today, some twenty year...

In a recent conversation with a friend, I learned that she is struggling to talk to her adult children about God. Apparently, they have decided that the Bible contradicts itself and therefore isn’t true. I wanted to understand what she was facing, so I asked for an example of the contradiction her children claim. She explained that, according to them, The Bible claims that God does not tempt humans, but God tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by placing the forbidden tree there. Because of that, they hold firm that The Bible isn’t God’s word, but rather words written by people who have an agenda. The rest of our discussion that day basically consisted of my friend responding to me like her children respond to her. I gave solid reasons why their theory was incorrect, and she came back with a misguided response based on their perspective. My friend said that since they claim to not believe The Bible, I couldn’t use scripture to prove my point. I admit it was a frustrating experi...

The 10 Second Rule Several years ago, my pastor preached a sermon on “The 10 Second Rule”. His brother-in-law had given him a book by Clare De Graaf that shared the same name. The basic gist of the title is that if you don’t do something you are led to do within 10 seconds of the initial leading, chances are, you won’t do it at all. Of course, it’s not referring to things like doing the dishes or laundry, because if it was, I am certain there would be piles of both that would never get done. I mean really, who thinks, “I should do the dishes” and within 10 seconds goes and does them? For those of you saying to yourselves, “I do”, I simply say to you, “SHOWOFF!”  (Haha!) No, the 10 Second Rule refers to things on more of a spiritual level. If we’re honest, we all have those moments when we are prompted to do something or say something, but do we? In a recent Bible Study on worship, a group of ladies discussed that even simple acts of obedience are considered worship. One lady ...

   Warning Signs The other morning while traveling to a friend’s house, a driver heading toward me flashed his lights at two different tymes. Once when he was far back, and then again when he was getting ready to pass me. We were on a country road, complete with winding curves and rolling hills or “whoa bumps” as I named them for my niece and nephews. You know, it’s that type of little hill that, when you go over it at just the right speed, makes your stomach leap up to your throat and you cannot help but let out an audible “Whoa.”     At the driver’s first, distant signal, I immediately thought to check my speed. You see, around these parts, flashing lights often indicate that there is a police officer ahead who, if you don’t, is ready to check your speed for you. While I was confident that I was not speeding, I glanced down at the speedometer just to reassure myself. As it turned out, I was going about ten miles under the speed limit and quickly let go of ...

Recently, a local pastor preached on the account in Matthew chapter 8 when the disciples were sailing across the sea and a violent storm arose. The pastor then posed an interesting question. If you knew everything that you would face by following Jesus, would you get in the boat? If you knew you would face the storm, would you get in the boat? If you knew you would be ridiculed, face hardships, danger, uncertainty, and the like, would you get in the boat? I’ve been thinking a lot about the question posed to me in that sermon. The truth of the matter is we humans like to have answers. We like to have knowledge. We like to have control of the situation...or at least think we do. There is just something comforting about being “in the know” … or is there? Adam and Eve knew a lot, but the knowledge that their Creator gave them everything they needed just wasn’t enough. They had to know more...they had to know what it would be like to do the one thing ... the ONE THING … God told them not to...

The other evening as I visited with a small group of friends, we discussed the biblical standpoint of friendship. The bible actually has a lot to say about friendship and the importance of being a true friend. The book of Proverbs is full of wisdom on the subject, while the Old Testament accounts of Jonathan and David outline and highlight a true friendship of the soul. While it’s true that not everyone on earth is blessed with a soul-ship like Jonathan and David, everyone does have the ability to be a true friend. As our discussion went on, someone commented that, “sometymes friendship is hard”. It was clear that this individual was struggling with the topic and while he could not give details, he admitted that one of his long-tyme friendships was becoming burdensome due to poor decisions on the friend’s part. The Bible - in Proverbs 17:17 - says, “A friend loves at all tymes, and a brother is born for adversity.” This verse tells us that friends...

There was a show in the 1980s called The Facts of Life, which was about 4 vastly different (from each other) girls who went to a private school and lived off campus with a ‘Den Mother’. As did all shows back in the day, The Facts of Life had a weekly opening, complete with a theme song. Even now, many years removed, I can still hear some of the words to the song …  “...You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have, the facts of life” ... In the show, one of the girls was usually going through a crisis of some kind and the den mother (Mrs. Garrett for those of you trying to remember the show) would usually impart some sort of wisdom to guide the girls through the, well, facts of life. Every now and then though, it was Mrs. Garrett who faced a crisis, and the girls would pull together to help her figure it out. As shows tended to do back then, someone – if not everyone – was taught a moral and valuable lesson about life. While a lot in this world ha...

One day, while traveling to a town named Bridgewater in my home state of Virginia, I happened upon some wildflowers that deeply caught my attention. The colors were many vibrant shades of pink and purple. Various white blossoms were mixed in, which, amongst the various shades of green stems and leaves, provided a beautiful contrast to the picture. Upon first glance, I knew I had to stop and get a picture.  As it happened, the wildflowers were not in a field, but rather in a wide strip of earth that served as a median between the north and south bound lanes of Route 42. I knew the task of taking a picture would not be easy or even really safe, but something prompted me to attempt it anyway. So, I pulled my car off on the right shoulder, parking as far off the road as possible.  I got my camera and made my way across the highway to gather some images of the random beauty around me. Fortunately for me, Route 42 wasn’t extremely busy at the tyme. I made my way into the wildflo...

In the Spring of 2023, I took a job where I sorted donations into categories like Housewares, Electronics, Toys, and Linens. The influx of donations on a daily basis was substantial and therefore made the job extremely fast-paced and physically demanding. We had to move a lot of stuff, and quickly, in order to stay ahead. Sometymes when I got a mixed bag, or what I called a “Mary Poppins bag”. of stuff … you know, the bag that has everything and just keeps on giving … it could be quite frustrating. I’d drop something in the electronics bin, pull out something that needed to go out to the book bin, only to find more electronics as I went through the bag. It really was quite exhausting. Because of the Mary Poppins bags, sometymes it just made more sense to stand in a central location and start tossing things where they went. Of course, this practice is not recommended for Housewares items; for whatever reason, coffee mugs, plates and such tend to break if you toss them. Odd. Hoever, fo...

Is there a difference between knowing something and believing it? I mean, when it comes to the price of gas, I know it is $3.60 a gallon, but I can’t hardly believe it. I know that a giant redwood tree grows from a seed about the same size as that of a tomato seed, but I have a hard tyme believing that it is possible. I know that I was made special, and I am loved, but do I believe it? Well… It’s probable that 95% of what we “know” is because someone told us. 4% we figure out by experimentation and that lingering one percent, well, that is reserved for the stuff we find out by sheer dumb stupidity. Dumb stupidity might sound a bit redundant, but really, it is a classification reserved for those things you just didn’t think through but made perfect sense after you suffered the consequences of them. Come to think of it, that one percent might be a little low for some of us, but I digress. The truth is a lot of what we know are things we accept as fact. We don’t question it because people...