Liminal Life

I’m going to participate in the Forty Days of Water challenge at Blood:Water Mission. Basically, you give up drinking everything but water for the next 40 days and give them the money you would have spent on coffee, beer, sodas, etc. They use the money to dig wells in African villages that don’t even have [...]

I had coffee yesterday with Jim Thomas, my pastor from The Village Chapel. He’s taking the church through the Sermon on the Mount and has hit the section where Jesus says several times “You have heard it said… But I say to you…” Jesus takes concepts like murder and adultery and says that we better [...]

I’m reading UnChristian. A book I can’t recommend highly enough. The premise of the book is that Christians have alienated ourselves from the rest of the world by acting in ways that can only be described as UnChristian. Where in the world would they get an idea like that?

I’ve already posted the story of our adoption here. But I have to write a bit more about it. Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the day we saw the picture of the four children we adopted.
Fifteen years. A lot has happened in that time. Think of it this way. A few months earlier, the [...]

We are part of The Village Chapel in Nashville. At our Easter services this year, we had three stories of how the Gospel has impacted people. Betsy and I told the story of our adoption and our move to Nashville. Here’s the script and the pictures we showed.
(FWIW, I’m really aware that this is a [...]

I’ve been crying a lot today.  And that’s a good thing.Betsy and I watched Amazing Grace, the movie that came out last year that tells the story of Wilberforce’s efforts to abolish the slave trade in England.  It also secondarily tells the story of John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote the incredibly popular [...]

I had coffee yesterday with Mark Hanlon from Compassion. Mark is the Senior VP for Sponsor and Donor Development and the looks to me like the head of Compassion in the US. I liked him a lot and it was great to have the time for both of us to tell our stories of how [...]

I’m not excited that this is the topic of my first real post to this blog. But I can’t seem to get this story out of my head…

I graduated from Naples (FL) High School in 74. There were a few teachers that had an impact on me. One of them was my history [...]