Opinions

It’s been a big year for our cat, Felix. Sometime in late 2023, Felix was scooped up off the street in Mexico by a teenager and brought to the home of her mother and aunt. I’m not sure how he was received when he arrived. They already had 11 dogs, at least a couple of cats and several birds. They gave him food and a home, and I imagine the teenager, Daniela, thought that the fostering arrangement would eventually become permanent.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. But is the old rhyme really true? Can words inflict harm and pain? The ingenuity of man has seen them develop stones, clubs and tools during the stone age that became spears used to bring down mammals. Combining their managing of fire produced brontosaurus burgers. Those instruments were fashioned into weapons that both protected them from predators, sometimes including man.

I receive questions about God and the Bible, and one of the more frequent is whether God really listens and answers prayer. We know He answers every request because of His promise in I John 5:14-15. “And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.” Since we believe the Bible is true, this is an amazing passage, but, it’s not the same as a signed blank check. Read again carefully and notice it says “according to His will.”

Yesterday, I got to talk with an old friend. I used to see Cheryl almost every day. But for the last several years, we have seen each other once a year, at most. She’s going to direct my show, so we’ll be working together again. We had coffee and soup on a very cold day, and I had this strange feeling I had slipped back in time. I didn’t need to explain a thing, talking to this old friend. I knew her and she knew me, and I lost track of the number of times we finished each other’s thoughts.

We are getting close to the end of the first month of 2025. A lot of lofty resolutions that were declared at the beginning of the year have been abandoned. Do you know what the second Friday in January is called? Quitter’s Friday. Why? Because most people have completely given up on their resolutions by that date.

I still want to believe in fairy tales. I like the neat and organized way fairy tales take an ordinary life, sprinkle it with magic and then make witches disappear and Prince Charmings arrive on cue, upon handsome steeds.

I don’t normally tackle controversial issues, but today I’m going out on a limb.

I am a sucker for watching the Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC. Doesn’t matter who is walking by foot, surrounded by the Secret Service, in fact, the pedestrian parade is kind of cool. Methinks, if I have had my druthers, a golfcart would be more fun.

From across the table at a local restaurant, a friend pointed to my wrist and inquired, “How did you burn yourself ?”