“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (George Eliot, 1861, Middlemarch). I hope and pray that I [...]

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Words. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em. Okay. I guess that’s not entirely true. We can live with ‘em…some of them. Not all of them. I’m thinking a lot about words right now ‘cause I’m preparing to teach a class on linguistic theory and well, there’s a whole lotta stuff about words in [...]

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Retarded. That’s what we called folks back in the day when I was an MR education major at Southwest Texas State. MR = Mental retardation. I was actually a member of a group called TARs: Teens Aid the Retarded. But people started frowning on calling kids retarded. So, it went from retarded to mentally handicapped. [...]

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It seems difficult for Millennials to find real heroes today. Christian teens especially struggle to find good role models and mentors. Mine was always Corrie ten Boom. I was twelve-years-old when I first saw The Hiding Place. My family was living in Oklahoma City at the time. Every Sunday my parents let me go to [...]

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Long, long ago in a land far, far away there was an old-maid missionary, uh, well, maiden who thought she heard God’s voice and attempted to follow that voice wherever she thought it was leading her. Her handy hearing-God’s-voice-manual came from a beautiful Kingdom Princess named Corrie ten Boom. The poor old-maid-missionary maiden (is that [...]

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I’m a total idiot. A spaz. I know that! I’ve always known that. So falling into the lake shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to me. It was my third trip to Finland. I had made some really good friends there on my maiden voyage. People in the Christian community were so kind to me [...]

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In the fall of 1988 I lived in Holland. I was teaching at a small Bible college in the town of Zeist. It was there that I met Pope. Not THE Pope, but a lady by the name of Pope. Thankfully she wasn’t Catholic or there could’ve been some real confusion in her life. Knowing [...]

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