Tag: Love
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Children
(2-minute read) Before our first child was born, I would not have known what to say if anyone had asked why I wanted children. It never seemed to be the right time financially, and I didn’t know if I could be a good father. When our first child, Debi, was born, everything changed the first…
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Do Feelings Have Value?
My wife, Jo, is experimenting with a series of paintings, trying to create a feeling without being abstract. She originally had a Pelican in the painting, but it didn’t have the right feeling. So, she changed it to the Pelican-ish bird, which doesn’t actually exist in nature. In her quest to be used by the…
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Dreams
(3-minute read) Where do my dreams come from? I don’t mean the ones when I’m sleeping but the dreams I have when I’m wide awake. After my sophomore year of high school, I asked my parents if I could attend art school during the summer break. There was something about art that always drew me.…
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Captive
(6-minute read) I attended an elementary school in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, when I was eight. After school, I would take a city bus back to my neighborhood. One day on the bus, a man started talking to me about the YMCA and everything to do there. He asked me if I wanted to go with…
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Desire a Miracle
(2-minute read) “Lord, would you let me see a miracle that would take away my doubts?” At the time, I was 24 years old, and I had recently had a salvation experience with God. It seemed reasonable; God wanted me to believe without doubting. It took me years to understand why he didn’t do that…
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Our Place
(2-minute read) Was God the Father just and fair with Jesus? I remember shortly after becoming a Christian, being thrilled with my salvation but feeling sorry for Jesus having to go through suffering and death. Where actually asking another to suffer and die might be wrong, Jesus was not another. In the temple courts, when…
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The Law
(2-minute read) When I was very young, my spiritual life was primarily guilt. After God created the earth, he established commandments for man to follow. I thought to keep things in order, anyone who disobeyed these laws was punished. It wasn’t personal; it was universal, and we were all in the same boat. Religion mainly…
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Picking Up Stones
(3-minute read) I heard some friends saying, “Hate the sin but love the person,” when talking about someone who had done something wrong. I thought it sounded spiritual and then used the expression one day when someone was caught stealing. I immediately felt the displeasure of the Lord. I recoiled, “What? It’s a good expression.…
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Love
(2-minute read) I love my wife. Why? I don’t know; I just do. I can tell you why I like her or admire her. I have reasons for those, but love seems so irrational. This August, we will have been married 56 years. You would think that I would be able to answer that question…
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Pirate’s Treasure
(3-minute read) In the early days of the American colonies, pirates plagued merchant shipping on the trade routes of the eastern seaboard and in the Caribbean. At their peak between 1715 and 1725, it is estimated that there were approximately 2000 pirates manning ships of various sizes. With no organized armed resistance against them, few…
Walking the path 