My mother is a southern belle, a steel magnolia, and a force of nature. She was born in Tyler, in the house I raised my girls. Her father died when she was seven. She was raised by an …
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Best Friends
This past weekend, I did something really fun. I attended a wedding of one of my childhood friends. Not a kid with whom I went to high school, or played football together, but a neighborhood kid. You …
On Providence
One of the crazy things about life in Christ in a fallen world is that we don’t always live like we believe. Take deism. We often act as functional deists, thinking of God as a kind of cosmic …
Family Business
I once heard a man say that he had been married to several different women, and they were all the same person. I know what he means. When I first married Ashley, she made it clear she had no real …
Sympathy for the Betrayer
I recently read a book on simplifying one’s life. One of the suggestions the author gave was to greyscale one’s smartphone so the phone has no color. The idea is that brightly-colored apps, photos, …
Scars
The day I learned to walk was momentous for two reasons. One, I became a two-legged creature, as I have been and will be every day of my life until I start using a cane. Second, I earned my first …
Stripped Away
It’s almost Academy Award time again, and one of the upsides to COVID and the shut-down of movie theaters across the country is that most movies that will be nominated for awards have already appeared …
A Grace-Filled Approach to STEM
I am sometimes asked why we make such a heavy financial investment in what, over the past decade or so, has come to be known as “STEM”-science, technology, engineering, and math-here at Grace. Others …
Harder and Softer
I’ve been in a reflective mood this week, because it has been nearly one year to the day since COVID turned our world upside down. A year ago, I was on a Go Week trip with our seniors in Washington …
The Gethsemane Prayer
As we enter the Lenten season and the march toward Easter, I’ve been reflecting on Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. I was thinking about that prayer in the context of the challenges we’ve …
Snow Days
I have lived in Tyler for 26 years, and in Texas my whole life. I have never seen anything like this. I live here, enduring 110-degree summers and car interiors that feel like ovens, so that I don’t …
Teaching for Shalom
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” …