The Graphics of Life

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...

Have you ever heard or seen something that made you stop in your tracks and self-evaluate? Let’s be honest, looking inward for the purpose of self-reflection and self-evaluation is not easy and the results can often be a little hard to handle. We are all growing and changing every day and if we don’t take the tyme to check up on ourselves, that change and growth, over tyme, can be more negative than positive. Well, today I saw something that made me stop, look inward and go, “hmmmmm”. It was a video of a little girl that was visually upset, not in that she was crying, but rather in that she was visually vexed by something. The video had subtitles, so I chose to read it first. Shortly into the video, the little girl said something that made me decide to restart the video and listen to it because it seemed to me that she had a message I needed to hear. Now, it turns out that the video was actually of this girl (probably 3 or 4 years old) having a conversation with her dad and the d...

My Lovely Aunt Ruth posted this and it got me thinking... God knows what we're going through, but we often forget, that if we love Him and are called according to His purpose (which we are if we love Him) then, He is working good in our lives. It can be really difficult to believe that when we can't even begin to see a way out of our current set of circumstances. The truth of the matter is, some of us were not geared to forge our own path through life. Some of us are helpers, followers, supporters and cheerleaders of others, but we have no ability to do those things for ourselves. We might not know why that is, but it's just how it is. It is just so much easier and much more fun to help someone else. When you are geared in such a manner, making life-altering decisions can seem overwhelming and crippling. Because of that, we tend to stand still and appear to do nothing and get or go nowhere. It's really hard to imagine that God understands that. Another truth is that whe...