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I’m not going to pretend the shouts from bystanders of “Good job!” and “Way to go!” did not penetrate deep into my withering soul and boost my confidence. I was glowing. After all, we were magnificent!

The Bingham girls and their siblings attended a segregated school to which they were transported daily in the back of a pickup truck, rain or shine, 20 miles each way.

The congregation started to rise—just a few at first. No one really knew how people would respond to this new idea: a reminder of our baptism that involved standing up, breaching the intimacy of touch, and having water placed on our foreheads. How comfortable would people be?

I had laid the foundation as soon as the frost was out of the ground and was framing the walls when Gloria was diagnosed with signet cell carcinoma, an aggressive appendix cancer.

Regret should send us running to Jesus, where we grasp his atonement and move beyond our guilt. Grace-inspired remorse should also prompt us to apologize and make amends.

I remember Tini. She was a teenage girl who lived with us during the war. When I was old enough to understand, my mother told me who she was and why she was with us. I had always wondered why this friend from my toddler years had suddenly left us.

Changes keep coming, and like waves on the shore, I can’t stop them. As Mom’s disease progresses, we have no choice but to move along with it.

Images flooded my mind. Each of those relationships has affected his outlook on life and what it means to live out his faith.

It was a day that would be etched forever in my memory and would change how I view life.

Those involved in the dairy industry have lots to say on this topic, but their voices are often silenced in the discourse around sustainable farming.

As a child I loved to pull my parents’ wedding album from under the bookshelf that held the fiction. I would dust it off and page through, pausing at my favorites. My parents’ wedding color was red, matching the church’s Christmas trees decorated with white lights and red bows. Candles lined the aisle and everything glowed.

I set my bike on the ground and trotted over to the truck. Inside, a man was sitting upright behind the wheel, his head on his chest, his hands hanging limp in his lap. Something needed doing, but where to begin?

Her story dates back more than 350 years to the Spice Islands of the Indonesian archipelago and the wars that erupted over their control.

Given time to reassess, to think about what the potential outcomes could have been, I would have made a different decision. I would not have swerved.

I was not the man of God I had portrayed; instead, I was in need of restoration and healing grace.

Recently I started a contracting company with two friends. We fixed the roof of a church and the exterior wall of a house. The church paid promptly. But an elder from the church who owns the house refused to pay the agreed amount.

The fallen leaves swirling along the avenue remind me that although it is warm enough to sit outdoors with my coffee on this October afternoon, winter is just around the corner. Looking up, I notice one leaf on an otherwise bare tree.

When we got the news that our adoption was annulled and I had been labeled a five-year hazard, I believed the entire year had been a waste, and I was the one who had wasted it. I believed this knowing what I know as a Christian in my head.

This is a theology not learned on the hill in the white-steepled church, but caught on the streets of the trailer park and inside the teen center while living in the shadow of the Chugach Mountains, a theology carried to me—taught to me—by those who walk on other city streets.

Years ago, during a canoe trip on a Michigan river, I stepped into what appeared to be shallow water to pull the canoe to shore. But the water was over my head. Instantly I was disoriented, grasping for anything to provide stability.

She sat across from me, a look of disbelief on her face. As she spoke, her eyes grew larger, her voice stronger. “These things would never, ever happen in my country,” she said. “But if they did, there would be a big problem for that person and for that person’s family.”

Eating the “clean fifteen,” seeking out grass-fed beef—has been tiring. And so far it has not fixed the world.

Parkinson’s disease doesn’t just sneak in and take all of your stuff, although that might be easier. You could make adjustments and move on. No, Parkinson’s starts out taking small stuff and you hardly even notice. But you do notice.