Opinions

When you think of success, what comes to mind? Usually, we think of success in terms of accomplishments. Winning a game. Graduating from school. Getting married. Being able to retire. The list could go on. However, have you ever considered the idea of success from a biblical perspective?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare may have penned that sentiment but the generations following him have worn the blush off. If it is true, however, that a rose would smell as sweet (by any other name), does the same hold true for a boat?

I was reluctant to come back from Mexico this spring, knowing it would still be cold and wet and cloudy. But I’d gotten used to looking for pretty things while in Mexico. I wanted to share the festivals and the art and the colors. I’d been taking pictures and sharing them on Facebook so my friends and family could see a little bit of the world that surrounded me.

The conversation always begins this way: “Susan, this is your Aunt Hazel.”

Stop me if you have read a pro Trumpian news story by HuffPost, the New York Times, or in the Washington Post. Or on television or cable news. Overwhelmingly tilted to the Left, it is not a surprise to see the nuts rolled out West. I no longer watch national news broadcasts. The liberal slant is as obvious as a rat sign in a sugar bowl. Permissive reports about politics, crime or pop culture - the sway of the mainstream media is geared to convince the great unwashed masses. Just how long before they wise up and revolt?

At our local golf course, there is a cordoned-off area for a bird which annually nests on the grounds underneath the towering pine trees. Even within the ropes, a person must look very closely to find this bird. With variegated plumage in gray and black, she looks like a pinecone, or simply a furrow in the earth upon which she sits.

As you have seen in the articles written by Mark Warde over the past couple of weeks, the First Methodist Church of Ennis has disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church. Our church has done so as have over 40 percent of the churches of our conference. If you read most of the popular publications in circulation, you are led to believe that it is all about the ordination of LGBTQ pastors or the marriage of homosexual couples in the church. While this has become the flash-point that has made worldwide news and brought denominational schism (division or disunion) to an abrupt reality, it by no means is the reason for my own disaffiliation.