John Bender: My impression of life at Big Bri's house, "Son?" "Yeah, Dad?" "How was your day, son?" "Great, Dad. How's yours?" "Super. Say, how would like to go fishing this weekend?" "Great, Dad. But I got homework to do." "That's okay, son. You can...
We can fight fire with water provided we can get it there soon enough. But often we act when it's too late. The result is splattered in the pages of our history: bloodbaths, uprisings, revolutions, you name. And on it goes. We learn so slowly. After ...
We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children o...
We were wiser as children if not for anything else but for our ability to always reflect. Reflection is a powerful tool to move forward into an enlightened stage of wisdom. Children reflect everyday about being reprehended, what made them happy, some...
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startli...
It is indeed a song of steps. And as I have often said to you, these steps are not made to descend but to ascend. The questioner wishes then to ascend; and where does he wish to ascend if not to heaven? What does this mean—to ascend to heaven? Does...
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened... Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the...
Evangelism cant be our focus! We must not stop sharing the good news, but here’s the deal, here’s the wonderful thing, it gets done along the way as you do discipleship. Great commission is just about going to disciple the nations and you know wh...
Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man ca...
President John F. Kennedy said it best, "ask not what your country can do for you -ask what you can do for your country" I may not be called to go fight behind enemy lines, but I am sure as hell going to make sure that our American soldiers are physi...
When you look through a window you gasp at the beautiful tree in the backyard or the magical sunrise coming over the horizon, No one looks at a window and is taken away by the complexity of the transparency of millions of atoms joined together to for...
An innate, typically fixed pattern of behaviour is our instinct. A sense of intuitive thought/feeling. An urge, an inner prompting, a drive, a compulsion. That quirky urge, that little voice inside you, those gut feelings is what emerges naturally wi...
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like...
Ask and you shall receive; everyone that asks receives. This is the fixed eternal law of the kingdom: If you ask and receive not, it must be because there is something amiss or wanting in the prayer. Hold on; let the Word and Spirit teach you to ...
We are sorry about the way things turned out. We gave, in the phrasing of our words if not literally in the words themselves, the false impression that these pages might hold some small fragment, some slight fragrance of a greater truth. That there m...
We are what we think. All that we are comes from our thoughts. Through thought we construct and destroy the world. Thought follows us like a cart follows the pair of oxen. We are what we think. Your imagination can cause you more harm than your worst...
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlaw...
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in...
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms...
Religion is for those who are without the pure knowledge of the Almighty true God- Jehovah the Creator of the Heavens and the earth..it is also for those who are ignorant of the fact of who God is and are neither founded in Him nor allign themselves ...
Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary...
