Homeward Bound

Hi faithful readers, I have finally decided to pull the plug on blogger.com and move to a more intuitive platform. Blogger disabled its subscription feature a while ago which left many of you in the dark; and as a whole, I have found the interface to be dated and not particularly user friendly for me or for readers.  So, follow my new blog content over at substack , which is built around a subscription tool, and is (so far) much better. I do not plan on moving old posts over there, so the blogspot will remain as an archive. I have a new introductory post up over at substack, where I would like to post a few times per month, but with baby #4 coming in a week or two, we shall see. Thank you for journeying with me!

This summer the garden has been the outlet for me. And as we come upon August, I am pleased to say our first year garden has not done entirely bad. My 5-year-old son has been my partner in crime for all things garden and chicken related. We built our raised beds together, raked manure into said beds together, planted seeds together, and did our "checking on how the garden is doing" together--just about every day. It is one of my greatest joys to sit and talk with him about these things as we learn together.  We started small, only 3 boxes, but the return has been favorable for a first year try. I planted easy things, popular plants that most people find success growing: bush beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, and cantaloupe--the last of which I am hoping to harvest by the end of the week. Of the assortment planted, beans and cucumbers were by far the most successful. Zucchini squash would have been quite a hit had it not been for the dreaded squash vine bore, and ...

This spring I have started a garden. It is as if a switch has gone off in my brain the moment I turned 30, and now I desire to plant things, water them, and watch them grow. I am a total amateur, ignorant of the entirety of it. I now have a few tomato plants growing outside, some zucchini already sprawling out. I have one bead dedicated to cantaloupe; but my peppers are still inside waiting to get a little bigger before I transplant them. We will see how it goes on my first year, maybe we will get some yield? I have learned this much: never set the bar high on the outset. As a novice I am at the mercy of others. I watch some youtube videos when I can, and in doing so I learned you are supposed to prune your tomato plants. There are strategies and a world of opinions on the topic, but apparently there are branches that grow at 45 degree angles called suckers, which in most instances, should be snipped. The video said these suckers block out the sun from other productive leaves and restr...

Few things strike our sensibilities quite as harshly as humiliation. To be brought low, to fall down, to struggle, to run out of answers, to become weak and poor—this is a hard place to fall into. But what if I told you the “valley of humiliation” is really green?  I am reading through part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress for the first time. It is a real shame I have put it off as long as I have as it sheds much light on the characters met and places visited in part I. The first part tells of Christian’s perilous journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Part II, perhaps less well known, is the story of Christian’s wife Christiana and their four sons as they follow in Christian’s footsteps towards that same City. It is all an allegory for the Christian life and one of the most celebrated works in the English language. It is also loaded with Scripture.  Throughout part II I am very curious how women and small children will fare on such a difficult journey. ...

It is easy to look at the wickedness in our world and be overwhelmed as we peer into the abyss. Mass shootings, regressive political administrations, global conflict, rampant immorality, the decline of Christianity--things appear very dark indeed. And the longer we gaze the more hopeless it becomes. How can we persist in a world so evil? How can we abide through to the end in the face of such opposition? How can we raise children in a world that is bent on inventing new ways to transgress the laws of God, and targets its messaging on them?  One way we can regain confidence is to stop looking at the world.  I recently finished reading The Lord of the Rings (a thoroughly enjoyable read!), and it is interesting to notice two characters who followed almost identical arcs. Saruman and Denethor both begin as powerful characters fighting against the enemy Sauron, and both lose their way. The wizard Saruman defects to the enemy, and Denethor, during the height of the siege, succumbs ...

There has been quite a buzz about the "He Gets Us" ads that have been building up and were shown during the Super Bowl. They are well done and grab your attention. I am hopeful that many people will dig into their Bibles and discover the thrill it is to know Christ and have faith in Him. You can view their ads on their website here . Charitably, there is only so much you can say in a few 1-minute advertisements. You want to make your point and get people interested in what you are trying to say. What irks me about the ads is what irks me about most advertising. It’s intentionally deceptive. Pharmaceutical commercials are notorious for this: look at the person smiling and living a normal life; look how happy this drug makes them; look how they can live as if their pre-existing condition no longer exists. What a good deal! Then, in the last five seconds the narrator speed reads a dozen negative side-effects and you are left wondering, "is this really a good deal?" Why...

We are coming up on a year from Bobby's death, and I remember that month before and the month after as one black shadow. It was a very trying time. Staying the night in a hotel in DC, expecting any moment to hear that he has died, only to hear him doing better in the morning. Then, back and forth, a little good news, some more bad news. He woke up! Now he is trending downwards, and we need to talk about removing life support. Talk about heavy.  He was very close to me, and I was blessed to have so many good memories of him. My family would go over there at least weekly, to grab a meal and hang out. It might not have been right but Bobby and I would poke fun at people, politicians, friends--no one was really exempt. We would make fun of ourselves. He was very self-deprecating and he loved to make people laugh. Montana and I loved watching him laugh at Tim Hawkins videos; he loved whatever kind of humor that is called. John MacArthur and Dave Ramsey were his favorites, and I would f...

G. K. Chesterton once commented on the marked difference between typical images found in Christianity and those found in Buddhism: "The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive." As I read this book I kept thinking of that contrast, and Trevin Wax's The Thrill of Orthodoxy is an invitation to behold this full and transcendent faith we have been confronted with the only way possible: with frightfully wide-open eyes. Wax lists out the ancient creeds which have, based on critical Biblical texts, formed a baseline of the Faith throughout the history of Christianity. Adherence to these stunning truth claims is what is called Orthodoxy, and deviations from it, heresy. Interestingly enough, these deviations are almost always thought in their time to be more thrilling than Orthodoxy. Human nature feels what C. S. Lewis called “the ho...

Fatherhood in one word is humbling. It has added pressures and revealed sin I have never had to address before. Life in the general seems to have this affect over time. When I was young I thought I was for the most part very good. This is typical of youth: because the previous generation has a track record that can be poked with holes, and because our lack of a track record can't, we think our lack of a track record preferable to theirs. Typical youths! I remember reading Proverbs and just taking for granted I was the wise character from the start: "Yes, that sounds like me, me, me again." But it is not until we take aim and fire that we see how far we are from the mark. It is not until we are tested that we see our score. It's not until we have to actually do something, and face some annoyances, and struggle, and sweat, and bleed a little--that we see who we really are. And after I have undergone some of that by my thirtieth year, I have found the fool has been insid...

I love the story in the gospels of the syrophoenician woman. The text in Matthew 15 goes as follows:  Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment. ** The story is fascinating because Jesus acts in what we moderns would call a “un-Christ-like” manner towards this...

Imagine for a moment year 2023 gives you exactly what you want. What if your ambitious resolutions are reached and your year is a year of growth unlike any other?  You may be surprised to hear a word of caution on the dangers of self-revolution. Jesus says an interesting statement in Matthew 12:43-45 as he pulls back the veil on the spiritual realm and describes what proves too often the case with human nature and our success: "When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation." We know little about what caused the impure spirit to flee, but we can figure that the person it ...