Above all else: protect the children

From the time we were expecting our first child, at least until the last one left for college, I saw myself as having ONE JOB ABOVE ALL OTHERS: protecting my children and keeping them safe. Nothing else really mattered. Our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage and so we were frantic to protect the next child.

If we had the chance to do it all again…

I came across a photograph of my high school graduation this week and was struck realizing that two of my friends in the picture and I are cancer survivors and the other two males in the picture, in line behind me, are both already dead.  It has me reflecting on the capriciousness of life. There

All the Days of My Life

This week brought my 60th birthday and the 27th anniversary of the day that Olga and I said “I do.” These two milestones have me reflecting on the memorable days of my life: both good and bad.  There have certainly been terrible days: Our miscarriage on 1/4/93, losing Dad on 12/30/02, losing my job on

Greater love has no one than this…

…that someone lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13) Today my family is celebrating the birthday of our son; he’s been our joy and delight for the past twenty years and now he’s a senior in college.  Today I also taught a room full of college students studying to be teachers and we

They are precious in His sight…

Even as a lover of words, my vocabulary fails me in expressing the frustration, grief, and RAGE I feel about the thousands of families that my nation’s government has torn asunder: children ripped—in some cases permanently—from the arms of their parents. The federal departments overseeing this human rights violation have not kept records and have

The things we brought from Indiana

In the summer of 1968, a big orange Allied moving truck picked up our belongings from our campus housing at Ball State, stopped in Fort Wayne for the household items we had in storage in our house there and made the trip across Ohio to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, where we would grow up and my

What you have done to the least of these…

Eighteen years ago this fall, I accompanied a group of college students on a retreat over at a beautiful camp in Angola, NY. The setting was on the bluffs high above the Lake Erie shoreline.  We had a delightful time there except for one terrifying incident that is still burnished into my memory two decades

A walk to remember…

I love visiting the grand old city of New York: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the energy that permeates the place; it is a paradise for a people watcher such as I. In particular I enjoy watching people walking dogs and pushing strollers, I suppose because those are two of my all-time favorite activities.

Living life off the leash…

9/11: Where do we go from here?

On this 15th anniversary of 9/11, I feel as if I still have more questions than answers:  Why so much hatred in the world? Why do we continue to let hatred and fear divide us? I have the sinking feeling that no matter who wins the presidential election this year, we all lose because the