Opinions

I approached the back door, and there they were: beautiful works of art, basking in the sun.

So, I got a cold. If you catch a cold in the winter, everyone is sympathetic. They tell you to drink hot tea and put on another sweater. A cold in the winter just seems like part of the season, and I can turn the thermostat up and wait it out.

We spoke last week about addictions that involve more people than we could imagine, and we should realize by now that personal problems happen whether one proclaims they are a Christian or not. We live in fleshly bodies with a default nature and its not a surprise that with our carnality having it’s own desires, we have difficulty staying on the straight and narrow. We mentioned that cognitive dissonance is when we know something is wrong and experience guilt from our lack of discipline, but we choose to do it anyway. Remorse is conviction and thankfully our compassionate God has provided the blood of Jesus as the way we can receive forgiveness when we fail to live up to the expectations of His standards.

It was years ago when the children and I went deep into our backyard to pick blackberries. The son asked the question of any child-picking-blackberries. “Why can’t we just eat them now?”

Some days, when I’m not sure how everything has gone so terribly wrong in this country, I find myself focusing on the image of the ruler that the Coca-Cola Company gave me when I entered first grade in my small town of southern Alabama.

Have you ever gone to the State Fair and you wind up watching a neighbor’s kid while everyone else goes on a ride that Timmy is not nearly tall enough to ride, no matter how much he tried to elevate on his tippy-toes?

I’m writing this on my birthday and feeling more than usually grateful.