To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Like a lot of people, Cliff Edwards wanted to hit the big time. Unlike most people, he actually succeeded. In 1909, Edwards dropped out of school in Hannibal, Missouri – he was 14 years old at the time – and became a traveling entertainer. He sang in saloons and flophouses across… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here How did hurricanes get their names? It’s a long and interesting story. As Eric Jay Dolin reports in his book A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes, there were no standard naming protocols prior to the middle of the 20th century. Storms were often tagged with the particular year… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Invictus is one of history’s most enduring expressions of self-reliance. It came from the pen of William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), a highly regarded poet and literary critic during Britain’s Victorian Era. From the age of 12, Henley had battled tuberculosis in the bone of his left leg. At age 20 it had… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here “I will tell you my secret: I have doubts.” Those are the opening words of John Ortberg’s 2008 book Faith and Doubt. As a general rule, we applaud individuals for such transparency. A confession of doubt these days is regarded as a sign of authenticity. Of course, we don’t really want… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here In his role as a feature writer for an outdoor magazine, Mark Adams writes about great adventures. Until a decade ago, however, he had never experienced one firsthand. All that changed when Adams hired a mountain guide and decided he would retrace the steps of the celebrated explorer Hiram Bingham (the… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Dandelion season is once again upon us. There’s a lot to love about these ubiquitous “weeds,” which grow in abundance on every continent, including Antarctica. They’re beautiful. Their very name (from dent de lion, French for “lion’s tooth,” a description of their jagged green leaves), generates smiles. They can even be… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here There’s a long-standing superstition in Indy Car racing that green cars are bad luck. Mel Kenyon, a 32-year-old rookie in 1965, was sponsored by Sprite. That meant his sleek racer would bear the soft drink’s lemon-lime hue. Kenyon failed to qualify for his first Indy “500” that year. But the brilliant dirt track… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Beware a pair of words that have the power to steal your life: If only. Relationship expert Les Parrott asserts, “Once you begin a sentence with if only, you have sealed the deal with regret.” If only I had saved a few dollars every week, the way everyone told me, I would… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here It appears that something monumental happened in 2023. Demographers will need to crunch a lot of numbers over the next few years just to be sure. For now, there are compelling reasons to believe that two years ago, for presumably the first time in history, the global fertility rate slumped below… Read more »
To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here Twenty years ago, 53-year-old Eugene O’Kelly was chairman and CEO of KPMG, one of America’s largest accounting firms. He lived life at breakneck speed. He and his family rarely went on vacation together. He missed virtually every school function of his seventh-grade daughter. But the O’Kellys would have all the time together… Read more »