Christmas . . . what do you visualize when you think about Christmas?  Dancing lights, shimmering bulbs, air thick with the delicate aroma of turkey; wisps ascending from frothy cups of hot chocolate.  Maybe your mind races warm with thoughts of carefully selected gifts, sugar cookies rendered brilliant by colored frosting and a dash of sprinkles, … [Read more...]

Christmas was an intentionally intentional decision of the most magnificent design.  It was a decision wrought from an angst borne of incomprehensible love, wholly tempered by an inconceivable and unsullied forgiveness, and it was relentlessly energized by a relentlessly infinite compassion.  It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and … [Read more...]

“Playing with fire” . . . I think that we’ve all heard that statement.  There’s a rather cunning, albeit misguided assumption in “playing with fire” that we can get away with something.  Really more than that, it’s an assumption that we can take a risk that’s potentially dangerous and either be shrew enough or quick enough to pull it off and … [Read more...]

We like to ‘fool around’ in ways that are sometimes rather humorous, quite innocent and very healthy.  At other times we ‘fool around’ in ways that are rather devious and quite destructive.  Sometimes we want to set the seriousness of life aside for a moment and be a bit playful.  We need to remind ourselves that life is a serious venture where … [Read more...]

Will the choice that you’re about to make, make you better or worse?  Will it improve your life, or diminish your life?  The fact of the matter is, it’s going to do one or the other.  And because it is, it’s worth asking the question, will it make me better or worse? The Clouding of the Question - People But that question itself can be … [Read more...]

It seems that the idea of taking a stand is perpetually taking a beating.  The whole idea of taking a stand is driven by the conviction that at certain times the need to take a stand is unarguably undeniable and inescapably inescapable.  Taking a stand is taking a risk, and sometimes a big one.  Unfortunately, not many people take a stand.  But … [Read more...]

There is no God.  It’s not an unfamiliar statement.  In fact, it permeates much of our modern thinking, which begs the question if our modern thinking is really either ‘modern’ or ‘thinking.’ We Don’t Want a God I think that the mentality that ‘there is no God’ is centered primarily on the fact that we don’t want a God.  Therefore, out of … [Read more...]

We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy … [Read more...]

What is ‘right?’  What provides our guiding function?  What is our “north star?”  Our constant?  Our set of rules that keep us civil?  Our code?  Or… is our code the commitment to the absence of a code?  What is ‘right?’ The Question… The question, “What is right,” must be asked without our efforts to choose what is ‘right,’ or to think that … [Read more...]