Aid To Dependent Children

Luke 6:41-42 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye.  How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. I’ve always had trouble visualizing this verse.  Every one of us has had the experience of getting a speck of dust in our eye so that part I get, but the picture of somebody going around with a plank in their eye just always seemed ridiculous…. and maybe that was Jesus’ point to draw attention to how absurd it is to judge other people, but I want to share a similar story that speaks to the judgmental attitude that Jesus was warning about. This is a true story from an old preacher I knew in my youth (I was 17 at the time I first heard this story).  I admired him greatly.  H...

I was sitting in a local deli with my lunch and the Kindle app up on my phone, reading for pleasure.  I was pretty much in my own world, but was distracted out of the corner of my eye by a young boy, maybe five years old, staring at me.  I saw that we had made eye contact, so I gave a short smile and tried to return to reading.  Sitting with him, were what I supposed was his mother and an older brother.  She was distributing the elements of the meal she had purchased to herself and the two youngsters. After a few moments of surreptitious glances, it seemed to me that he was not interested in the meal and just stared at one thing and then another.  He was not making any effort to eat the food placed in front of him, but he was being quiet and so did not occupy his mother’s attention as the other child did.  He just silently watched the activities that go on in a busy, restaurant at noontime but he seemed to be disinterested -- like something was on ...

    I’m not a writer, but I write.  By that I mean that I have no formal education in writing.  I have no resume of my compositions. After reading these articles you may say I don’t even have writing talent.  But somewhere in my core is a desire to write. I have written things, of course.  It is hard to go through life without recording events or random thoughts or ‘putting a few words together.’  Lately I have had an extraordinary desire to write on a regular basis -- thus the purpose of this blog. I grew up poor in a small town in the midwest.  I was the son of a blind preacher. The terms ‘blind’ and ‘preacher’ put him on a road not destined for wealth without a struggle.  My father seemed disinterested in making big bucks so it was never going to happen. I spent much of my childhood on ‘welfare’ and as they called it ‘Aid to Dependent Children.’  I learned to hate the phrase. I am not against providing as...