Sixth in a series. Read part five. When the deacon and his wife came to our house to counsel me about salvation through Christ, the youth pastor and his wife (who remain friends to this day) came along to talk with my wife. Unsure about this “Christian thing,” my wife held out. Meanwhile, the deacon…
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Fifth in a series. Read Part Four. As much as we liked the church we were visiting, we only went every two or three weeks. Providentially, we skipped services the Sunday morning my stepson called. I listened as my wife talked. As clueless and insensitive as I can be, I could still tell from her…
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Fourth in a series. Read Part Three. A couple of months after my meltdown over my stepson sassing his mother, we encountered more problems. Three weeks into the school year, the principal’s office called my wife to let her know her son had never been to class. To make sure he did, she started driving…
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Third in a series. Read Part Two. Life is filled with disappointments and aggravations. As Jesus put it in John 16:33: “In the world you will have tribulation ” (MEV). Despite that promise, after the move to Colorado I related in my two previous blogs, I had never bargained for the maddening frustrations I encountered…
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Second in a series . Read Part One. We moved to the metro Denver area in 1981, thinking we were setting out on a life of new adventures, excitement and riches. Instead, we found God. Or, I should say, He found us. Because of the area’s oil industry-related economic boom, my wife and I both…
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First in a series Another day, another pastoral scandal—at least, sometimes that’s what it seems like lately. Amid such disheartening news comes the modern movement known as “deconstruction”—examining one’s basic faith assumptions in order to tear them down. While I see it as a way of making excuses for leaving church, it’s so pronounced that…
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Second of two parts Read the first part After having to put our treasured dog to sleep in January of 1997, we decided for many practical reasons—including regular out-of-town trips back then—that we wouldn’t get another. That was the reasoning side. The other, more emotion-driven one was that losing Shadow was so painful that I…
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First of two parts Many years ago, I grudgingly accepted the idea of getting a new dog to replace the one we had to put to sleep after he got injured. Unlike people who shell out hundreds of dollars for a canine, we found ours for free through The Denver Post classifieds. Only two members…
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Back in October of 2015 Sam Quinones spoke at the Marshall University student center, an event that drew a packed house. It was six months after the release of Dreamland, the author’s chronicling of the opioid epidemic in Middle America that still plagues this part of the nation. Most audience members were familiar with the…
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After encountering a pastor recently who questioned my motives for contacting him (maybe to get his side of the story?) for a magazine feature, I am more convinced than ever that Christians need to take some chill pills and shed their media hostility. The church seems to often swallow the same hysteria consumed by the…
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