• SNOW CHANGES EVERYTHING

    Classes get cancelled, teachers have to reschedule. Parents have to miss work and pay checks to stay home with the kids or go to work and pay extra for child care. Some people make it home by the grace of God and the angels that walk among us, while others abandon their wrecked vehicles on…


  • THE NO ROOM INN

    Context is everything. In the real world of my daily hikes, the objects in this artwork are pieces of trash that I’ve found lying near the path that I walk. Put together with a fresh eye to shape and color, they become instead a nativity scene. I live in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a place known…


  • Are we the Good Shepherd or Are We the Lost Sheep?

    Recently a male acquaintance of mine had the temerity to suggest that perhaps I might need one of those buttons that calls for help to a distant monitoring site. I had told him I’d been sick and he knew I lived alone. I was feeling much better by then and retorted, “As long as I…


  • Time and Eternity: Standing Still While the World Rushes By

    Greetings at the transition of the old year and the beginning of the new year. I took a long break from my weekly journal to participate in the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it’s so fondly called. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. I didn’t make it, but I didn’t join…


  • A WORK IN PROGRESS: Grieving Enabled Through the Creative Process

    Just the other day, one of our younger clergy brothers died from a massive heart attack in the wee early morning hours, or late at night during his sleep, depending on your point of view. His contemporaries were in a state of shock, as well they might be, for if death could take a strapping…


  • BRINGING IT LIKE BON JOVI

    I dilly dallied, as is my usual habit. I have some inner compunction that forbids me to turn up too early. It’s a learned behavior from early childhood: showing up too soon meant additional chores, whereas I’d rather be playing or reading or doing my art. However, Bon Jovi was coming to Verizon arena and…


  • The One Who Shows Weakness Is The One Who Is Healed

    Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful…


  • A DEEPER SOURCE OF WATER

    I’m sixty five years old. I have an iPhone. When I see an interesting image, I stop and park my car. I take a little walk, getting in a few more steps for my otherwise sedentary life. The viewpoint then becomes important, otherwise I’m just taking snapshots. The place has “called me,” as we say,…


  • THE PARK MAY BE CLOSED BUT THE CITY ISN’T

    I took the back way home. Even though I was using the GPS, I deviated from her well intentioned directions. Perhaps I was just intent on exploring, or perhaps I had “authority issues” I needed to work out on leadership, since no one in our country’s Capitol seemed to care for the the poor and…


  • The Sunlit Tree

    I am not a point A to point B person, but what right brained artist is? Yet, making a work of art requires planning and structure, just as building a house requires plans, or both will fall apart before very long. This is why some of our efforts continue to please us many years into…