I’ve been going through long forgotten boxes upon boxes of photos of our family taken over the half-century my wife and I were married. When I sent this of our son to him (he now has children of his own) with the overlay of some advertisement the product for which I now forget, he quipped […]
Letter: Just Watch, You’ll See
What a beautiful morning this is! The sun is shining, the water so blue, I’ve been in love, how ‘bout you? In just 12 days, March 19 – the first day of spring in fact – my wife of 50 years married will have been gone one year. In addition to the too-many-to-recount memories (although […]
Letter: Every Day
This month of March my wife of 50 years married will have been gone one year. Life goes on, until it doesn’t. Love will last forever, but then it ends. And it is through experiencing first hand the finality of it all that I am hoping to share with others what anymore matters. Like the […]
Letter: Next Time
Only six-thirty, the old mantle clock read, but he was already tired. The half-hour chiming would, within mere minutes, stir him from his reverie. The man – his age reflected in greying temples and permanent laugh lines etched and pronounced, his eyes crinkling at the corners when he smiled – gazed up at an angle […]
Letter: Go Gently
There’s an ancient proverb that flat out states, “The blessing of the Lord makes rich and he adds no sorrow to it” (Proverbs 10:22). At face value, that’s just flat out wrong. There is no such thing as blessing without brokenness. There isn’t. Life is not a fairy tale. We don’t live this life without […]
Letter: Where I Found My Dearest Treasure
When I was a pastor on Whidbey Island, and our children were very young, we had just finished reading “Blackbeard’s Ghost” to our ‘little pirates,’ so it seemed reasonable, living on an island after all, for them to set off in search of buried treasure. So down the beach they went, child’s yellow shovel in […]
Letter: Saying Goodbye
It is never easy – much more like gut-wrenching misery – to say goodbye to someone you love. The promise of love is like the spring sun that warms the earth where late-fall bulbs were planted. Responding from beneath the soil little green sprouts suddenly appear and excitement builds for the intricate beauty of what […]
Letter: And I Think to Myself, What a Wonderful World
My writing desk is surrounded by joy. There’s the latest drawing by my granddaughter depicting her conception of her picture being taken by her mother, whose outstretched cell phone captures both their biggest-grin faces, and both – accurately drawn – with lots of hair. “And that’s you grandpa,” she said, pointing to the stick figure […]
Letter: The World Has Been Waiting for You – Breathing Life Into Your Story
This is about you. This is about anyone and everyone who has (and truth be told, who is there who has not?) suffered a life-shattering loss. This is about those whose heart has been broken, stepped on, crushed, and who, weeping on their knees, begin, blinded by tears, gathering up the shards of what remains. […]