Category: Personal
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Jump, Jump, Jump
This video was filmed and edited by my good friend Josh (of JGills fame); everyone in it is a friend. A frightening number of them are related to me. The Nerdfest may or may not be happening in my house . . . The kid in the red shirt who really can actually dance is…
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Halfway Awake
I have been up for two hours, but I’m only halfway awake. Some days it’s just really hard for me to stop sleeping, even after I’m vertical and have eaten and studied my Bible and gone through the whole morning routine. I suppose being up until nearly 2:00 a.m. doesn’t help. This morning I hoped…
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Trusting God for Finances
Remember the “Work, For I Am With You” article I wrote a while back? It shared a lesson I learned last spring about trusting God for my income, and the subsequent slashing of my student roster: I went home simultaneously buoyed and subdued. I knew God might allow things to get worse before they got…
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Happy New Year
(I am terrible at titles. I realize this post should have a more original one, but who can think up good titles at quarter to 2 in the morning?) So here we are, the end of one year, the start of another — more significantly, perhaps, the end of one decade, the start of another.…
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Reasons and Reasons for Hope and for Happiness
Amy Carmichael, on a picture of the Alps — a pine-filled slope leading to a misty valley, with mountains beyond and clouds edged with light. I see in this valley and mountain a general view of our years. We stand, when we are young, on the sunny slope among the pines, and look across an…
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Christmas Children
Luke 1 is one of my favourite scriptures. Far less famous than Luke 2 (“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus” — you know the one), the entire chapter is potent with the intervention of God. Praise, prophecy, and the workings of the impossible —…
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Fiction at the Rim of Knowledge
As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible — or at least visible, at least discussible — those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human…
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Who Am I, Anyway?
Yesterday I spent half an hour or so rounding up my editing credentials for a potential client who wanted to know more about who I am and what I’ve done — happy clients, published books, industry connections, and so on and so forth. It’s an interesting exercise, this putting together of a public face to…
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Passages: The Landmine of Me
Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing was a fantastic shot in the arm years ago when I was playing with the idea of becoming a writer. He understands what it means to be creative and can articulate it like few others. This short passage is from the Preface. These essays were written at…
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Playing Guitar with Oven Mitts
As I sit at the computer, watching the clock strike 11:01 when I meant to be in bed at 10:00, and think over the day’s events — the phone calls I muddled my way through, the little Dodge Neon I bought though all these years I’ve planned to buy a minivan, the schedule which continually…