I’d like to pose a question. Do you know anyone in this world who has ever disliked or said anything bad about Jan Knox? Go ahead, mull it over. Take as much time as you like. I am 100% sure that you can’t think of a single name. I’m just as confident that will remain true forever. In fact I’d like for this blog post to be the official start of my campaign to have my mother considered for sainthood….
Two of my boys will be home for the summer. I would of course prefer to have all of them home, but I will take what I can get! We are celebrating male bonding by playing fantasy baseball together and by watching all ten episodes of Band of Brothers. This is the first time that I have watched each installment in this mini-series that is based on the real experiences of World War II veterans. The show has really affected…
I said goodbye to a friend today. She passed from this life last Sunday after a valiant battle with cancer. I am not allowed to share her age. She made that forbidden territory. But I will say that she was four years younger than my mother, who was born in 1927. I use my mother’s age as a frame of reference primarily because Sara treated me like she was my mother. Every Sunday after church in the foyer we went…
In 1972, we were sitting in the lunchroom at Wind Point Elementary Schoolexchanging cans of snack pack pudding and discussing the Green Bay Packers. You notice I said “cans” of pudding. Plastic containers were still in the research and development stage at that point in our lives. In 1972, we were carefree. We were mischievous. We were not interested in academics, but we appreciated the social aspects of school. We kept things hidden in our lockers that would have caused…
Looks can be deceiving. Yesterday I played golf with an older gentleman that I was introduced to by a mutual friend. Physically speaking he can no longer hit the golf ball with a lot of force. He is a little slower in playing the game in general. There were probably players behind us wishing that the old man would speed it up a little. But looks can be deceiving. The older gentleman’s nephew also joined our group yesterday. He mentioned…
The facebook message seemingly came out of nowhere on January 19th of this year. It was short and to the point. It simply said: John, did you live on 4 mile as a kid? (4 mile is the name of a road by the way.) I replied in the affirmative, so the next message was even simpler. It read: Remember me? How could anyone forget Ray Christenson? Ray lived almost directly across the road from the house I grew up…
The telling of The Parable of the Good Samaritan is prompted by the question: Who is my neighbor? That is a good question. Who is my neighbor? Serving as a law enforcement chaplain for the past 22 years has taught me that in some cases the answer to that question is…nobody. I do mean nobody. I have gone with police officers to deliver death notifications on more than one occasion when the person receiving that unexpected and awful news has…
I am not normally a list maker, but I made one out last night. It never actually made it to a piece of paper, but it was very detailed in my mind. I conjured up a list of six really stressful, unpleasant, sad, or irritating things that happened to me in the past week. I liked my completed list. It justified my grouchy mood. I woke up this morning and ran through the list in my mind again and again…
My assignment for this week is simple. I am to reach out to someone whose background is very different from my own. It is a timely assignment. Here is why: When we refuse to throw a relational life ring buoy, someone is going to drown. Such life buoys are on my mind right now. I received a phone call from a longtime friend earlier this week. She was quite disturbed the day she called. She told me about attending the same…
I am currently reading Dr. Tim Clinton and Dr. Gary Sibcy’s book entitled: Attachments: Why You Love, Feel, and Act the Way You Do. It is an exceptional resource. This evening I ran across this quote from the book: ”Feeling loved and being heard are so similar, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.” My mind immediately went to my longtime professor, mentor, and friend Charles Siburt… OK, I hear you…How many times have I heard Dr. Siburt say that? And how…