OK, let me confess something; I am not very talented when it comes to growing things. In fact, everytime I’ve tried to plant and tend a garden, it has ended up either overrun by weeds or eaten by critters or over watered or under watered! I just don’t have the proverbial “green thumb.” I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a lack of patience, or a lack of discipline. Or maybe it’s just…

One of the greatest practical jokes ever played on me was when some friends actually hid my car from me while I was at work. As a teenage boy, my car was my ticket to freedom. It represented my passage from a child to a man! Besides, I looked really cool driving it around the mall parking lot with the windows down, hoping that pretty girl would notice! I panicked! I looked…

“Who touched Me?” What? Lord, the whole crowd is pressing in to touch You, and you ask “Who touched Me?” Lord, it doesn’t make sense. Everybody is touching You. I imagine that is what most of the disciples were either thinking or saying when the Lord asked this question in a large crowd one day. In reality someone had touched Him, but she had touched Him in desperation, in faith. After all,…

You know the old saying “God works in mysterious ways.” Well, that may be true, but that doesn’t make my confusion over why things happen in my life any better! In fact, I have to confess to you that most of the short and cute little theological phrases (“Just trust the Lord” or “It’s all for the best” or “It was God’s will”) we use to “comfort” others during hard times are…

The old coder adage “Garbage in – Garbage out.” It meant that if the computer programmer got his code wrong, then it just stands to reason that the program wouldn’t work properly. What is true for computer programming is true for all of life. There is a current dust up about Genetically Modified Organism science and how certain foods are genetically modified to resist pests, or disease, or to be more colorful.…

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” This saying has been around a long time and been attributed to several famous and not-so-famous people, but it rings true, doesn’t it?: It’s hard to communicate AND easy to miscommunicate, especially if both speaker and hearer want to misunderstand! We are a people strongly…

The act of communication is an amazingly difficult task, because we humans communicate on so many levels: Verbal (obviously), Visual (both in writing and gestures, facial expressions), Auditory, and Sensory. We communicate, intentionally and unintentionally along all these spectrums all the time. And guess what, we still struggle with misunderstanding! Just think of the multitude of “messages” you send everyday, both great and small. It’s an amazing thing this art of communication.…

I laughed out loud when a comedian started talking about words that seem to contradict each other. Phrases like “Jumbo Shrimp” and “Military Intelligence” and “Government Efficiency.” They just seem to cancel each other out! On a more serious note, St. Anthony the Great, the desert dweller, once said: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying,…