Museums, documentaries, and travel literature all highlight the Greats, the Firsts, the Earliest’s, the Originals, the Movement-Makers: this famous person slept here, ate here, and played music here. Epigraphs memorialize shocking instances of violences or loss: waters of this hurricane reached here, these thousands killed here on this battlefield. …

See how the happiest color shows up in this historic Virginia town. In every childhood conversation with my very best friend about our favorite colors hers was always green and mine was always orange. Every time. It still is, because it is The Happiest Color. To my delight, I found it in abundance in a little town we always passed by on the way to visit Baltimore family, but never stopped and explored.

Friendship: Part Three of Three As this year draws to a close, I also draw this brief series to a close as I reflect on the ways friendships in 2022 have brought me emotional and spiritual renewal. There are souls whose paths converge for a time, bending outwards and returning…

A review of a popular Christmas song — We all have those love/hate relationships with things we know don’t exactly tell the whole story but tug at our difficult-to-tune heart strings. Discernment between ennobling cultural traditions and the merely sentimental is often elusive and temptation lurks, Grinch-like, to join the cancel choir that brings condemnation without hope. …

or, The Mirror — Daily we enter the arena armed with rocks, words, stone Bone they crush, cut sinew. O! we are the courageous ones suffering under imagined dragons We overcome with well-stocked armories: Emerge persevering victors quoting mighty men While with clenched fists hurl words Emerged from stone cold consciences crushing image bearers. A glance at our bright materials Reveals dragons gazing back.

Friendship: Part Two of Three — One of the greatest gifts God gives us are friendships that are life-giving, but we all know, or have recently learned, that all friends are not always in a place to be there for us when we need them and vice versa. But, oh thank you Jesus when they are…

Friendship: Part One of Three — Do you have a loving companion who is other than your spouse or partner? What, then, is this friendship like? Describe it, if you can, because such things are joyful to hear! What is your friendship like? What is the depth, or breadth of your relationship? What does your conversation…

A few thoughts on self-discovery — MOLTING The molting process in which certain species shed their dull exoskeleton to reveal a gleaming brilliant surface underneath is a lovely lesson of the cycle of life. Snakes, frogs, dogs, and humans regularly rid themselves of old skin cells to make room for the new. …

A High Priest with Skin in the Game We do not have a High Priest. Two Names given breaking 400 years of silence: Jesus, Yeshua, Savior, for he will save his people from their sins Immanuel, very God with us. Who, being in the form of God did not consider…