Pastor Audley Black’s church near the south coast of Jamaica has been in a building program since at least 2005. That was the first time I visited his church and saw that they were expanding. The last time I was there—in the spring of 2011—some of the walls were up. By that summer, they had started on the roof. When I suggested to Pastor Black that perhaps the church would be done by 2013 when I thought I might return, he said it was a possibility.
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Think about the worst intellectual matchups possible. For instance, what if we put Albert Einstein in a room with a first-grader to debate the theory of relativity? Or how about George Washington Carver versus a middle-schooler discussing biochemical engineering?
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In August 2009, Blair and Ronna Martin lost their energetic 9-year-old son Matti when he was dragged to his death by a family cow. I had a chance to meet this Kenai, Alaska, family and share in their grief. And I know how tough this tragedy has been for them.
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What is it about a name that makes it so special to us? I began thinking about this after talking to a teenager as we stood outside her church in Black River, Jamaica, one Sunday morning. She asked, “Would you mention my name in Our Daily Bread?” I asked her if she had a story to tell, and she said, “No, just mention my name.”
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Just as her friends were doing, my daughter Melissa was busily preparing for adulthood. At school, she was getting ready for college by taking the right courses and had signed up for the ACT college entrance test.
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While searching for an interesting way to instruct my college writing class about the concept of writing a biographical sketch, I found this idea: Write a biography in six words. When asked to do this, Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Hemingway wrote this poignant bio: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Imagine the sad story behind those six words.
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To be honest, I wasn’t happy to be making another trip to the store. For the previous 4 weeks, my wife and I had been trying to get a refund for a bad refrigerator. As I spoke with the manager—again—it seemed that we were heading down another dead-end road. As we talked, I wondered if we would ever get our money back, but I tried to be gracious.
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A friend who is a heart transplant cardiologist has an appreciation of Ezekiel 36:26 that not many of us can understand. Mike manages the pre-operation and post-operation care for heart-transplant patients. He’s often in the operating room as surgeons remove diseased, discolored hearts and replace them with vibrant, pink “new” donor hearts.
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Because I’ve written many articles and a book about dealing with life’s losses, I have the privilege of being introduced to a number of fellow strugglers along life’s journey. One of my new friends is a mom whose 21-year-old daughter died suddenly in 2009, which sent her reeling. She told me, “I feel like an outcast from the normal world. I feel crushed and my soul is in so much pain.”
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Everybody was wrong about the ark of the covenant (an item in the tabernacle that represented the throne of God). After losing a battle to the Philistines, Israel sent messengers to Shiloh to ask that the ark be hauled to Ebenezer, the site of their army camp.
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