Monthly Archives: April 2023

Riding Fence

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Cattle are not the brightest lights in the barnyard chandelier.  As Winnie the Pooh might describe them, they are creatures “of little brain.” But in one regard they are absolutely brilliant – the idiot savants of all livestock, as one cattle owner describes them. If there’s a weak place or hole of any kind… Read more »

The Buzz about Mosquitoes

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. “Mommy, why did God make mosquitoes?” That’s a very good question.  And it’s one that grown-ups annually find themselves asking as spring weather morphs into the signature heat and humidity of summer that mosquitoes seem to love. “Mosquito metrics” are daunting.  Entomologists know of at least 3,500 species, 175 of which are proud to call… Read more »

Us vs. Them

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. A man was walking across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge when he saw a woman looking lonely and despondent. Fearful that she was about to do something desperate, he ran to tell her that God loved her.  A tear came to her eye.  Then he asked her, “Are you a Christian, Jew, Hindu,… Read more »

4:00 pm Today

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Jerks definitely make the world a more interesting place. Gary Larson likewise made the world far more interesting during the 15 years that his Far Side cartoons ran in syndication in more than 1,900 newspapers. Larson is now 72 years old and retired from the craft that made him globally famous.  He put down… Read more »

Generation to Generation

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. By and large, the Ten Commandments are wonderfully brief and straightforward. Don’t lie.  Don’t murder.  Don’t steal.  Don’t commit adultery.  The second commandment is a bit more complex: “Don’t make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.  Don’t bow… Read more »

The Visited Planet

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. The picture above is beautiful.  And also disquieting.  Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are hurtling toward the surface of the moon in the Apollo 11 Lunar Module on July 20, 1969.  Within a few hours, Armstrong will take his “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  No one suspected at the… Read more »

Take Up and Read

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. It’s rare for people to admit they’ve made big mistakes in the past. A pair of church historians, William Cook and Ronald Herzman, recall the time the moderator of a political forum asked the candidates vying in a local election to acknowledge a single personal misstep – anything at all – and what… Read more »

Open the Drapes

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Charles Dickens is hands down the most famous fiction writer in the history of the English language. A few years ago, he was cited as the author of the most memorable line in all of British literature: “God bless us, everyone!” (Tiny Tim, from A Christmas Story). But that’s just the start.  Dickens also… Read more »

Gluttony

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. All sins are not created equal.  Some moral failures are clearly worse than others.  Our consciences may nag at us for rolling through a stop sign at 3:00 am, or cutting the little tag off a Sealy mattress, or smiling at Aunt Gertie and saying, “Why, of course, I’d love nothing more than… Read more »

Telling Your Story

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Sometimes hope is born in the darkest places. During the totalitarian regime of Josef Stalin, it was illegal to speak even a word against the government of the Soviet Union. Political dissidents, artists, and “undesirables” were routinely seized and sent away to the gulags, which were forced-labor camps.  More than a million never returned. One of… Read more »