The Flatpicking Pilgrim's Progress
Stories and tales from a guitar-picking writer, theologian, speaker, blogger and entertainer. From small town quirks to the bizarre realities of family, whacky church life and slightly damaged kinfolk, insights from a reluctant son of the South takes you along. Never know where it’ll end up but it’s sure to be worth the trip.
Episodes
The pastor preached a gospel sermon of hope and resurrection. The worship was inspiring. AsI left, I felt something in my chest, a familiar and indescribable twinge, as though I had accidentally walked into a beautiful hidden room full of old treasures from an earlier life. It was hope.
We are in a profoundly toxic public moment. But I will remind us that down on the ground, there is far more hope and light than you’d think from watching your preferred media. I’d suggest we let our children and teachers remind us again of who we are.
As Lent begins today, reflections on the life and words of Thomas Merton. Amid the chaos of ultranationalism and disruption, we need to grow deeper, not more distracted. Elton Trueblood told us, "We shall never have a better world until we have better persons in it."
In the insanity of this present moment, finding inner peace is not an escape, nor a contradiction. It is essential, to be able to hear thaT inner voice that w...
An unforgettable day. But I was most touched by something his daughter said that night. She told us a little-known fact—that part of his childhood was spent in a children’s home. His family was disconnected by life. She said one of the reasons he loved sports teams so much was that family life had been hard for him. At the park, though, no matter who you were, or even what you had done, as long as you had the price of admission, yo...
In other words, unity of heart, spirit and love can exist even though we must have differences that will take longer to resolve. We begin with this willingness to know a fellow Christian’s heart and build upon the possibility of fellowship. It does not mean give up our convictions. But we must begin with the hardest and highest call Jesus gave to us—to love one another as He loved us. That is not what we do once we have worked ...
I want you to consider this: three astrologers came from Persia, without knowing anything about who they were dealing with in Herod. The salvation of the world lay innocently in the arms of his mother, nothing to protect him from the power of the state. His fate depended on these strangers and what they were to make of a dream they had that likely woke one of them up in the middle of the night with an uneasy feeling.
Cryptic and mysterious messages begin coming through the unlikeliest of messengers: an elderly woman in a nursing home. Crowds flock to see her, and experts try to determine what causes it. The local ministers are perplexed. Is it the medication? Dementia? Wishful thinking?
It was a desperate time. You might even say the worst of times. And the story plainly says that while we were still lost in the tragedy called sin,God showed up, as Forrest Gump once said.
Since America is still sorting out the end of yesterday's tribal war, with one group acting like they won the Iron Bowl and the other looking for an immigration application to Canada, maybe it would be better to tell a story about something else. A church vote and a lesson in winning and losing.
I wish everyone could know, way early on, that they’d have to make that journey one day. That it might be a long way, and your transportation limited, and time running out. I guess then I might have lived some things a little differently. It was so easy when time seemed to stretch out forever to think it didn’t matter as much as it actually did, even then. That so much of the virtual foolishness of our time doesn’t mean anything at...
I spent Labor Day relaxing a bad board on my deck and I'm pulling nails. You know, nails go in easier than they come back out. Eventually, a board gets so bad you have to do something, and there you are,
having to repair, pull ‘em out, and sometimes, when all else fails, just drive the dang thing down into the board, forever there to mock you.
“ONE MOMENT I WAS a regular person with regular problems. And the next, I was someone with cancer. Before my mind could apprehend it, it was there—swelling to take up every space my imagination could touch. A new and unwanted reality. There was a before, and now there was an after. “
Cryptically, Tom said in his last words before dying, that he had never harmed a hair on that girl’s head.
So which was it? Here is the essence of great murder mystery—passion, jealousy and betrayal, intrigue,
and rivalry of others.
When we are wringing our hands, troubled in mind, struggling with hope and anxious to the gills, I can pick up my mandolin our guitar at home, play a tune, and feel something lift out of the room. Wherever that sound came from (and as a man of faith, I think I know), it says, “There’s still something unexpectedly beautiful up ahead. Go on, and don’t give up.”
It wasn’t a perfect world, and a lot of divisions and pain were yet to come. But they had one shining moment, too young to even understand, when they poured onto those bloody beaches, the fate of the Western World on those shoulders.
In today's podcast I review Jonathan Haidt's important book on the impact of social media and phones on our children. A powerfully important book and research to know about.
Children are learning socially, experimentally, all the time. He is hopeful that it is not yet too late. His chapters are very readable and accessible. He places summaries at the end of each section so that his argument is plainly understand...
“The second before the sun went out, we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon.” Annie Dillard
They stood at a distance
while the women cried, brokenhearted, devastated, sobbing,
and his mother beyond soothing.
Poetic reflection. When your hopes are dead and you're going to the tomb with an impossible stone to move, what will you do?
On a trip to Israel in 2010 I ended up voluntarily being locked in to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of the crucifixion. As the crowds left and a handful of vigil-sitters and contemplators stayed behind, this happened.
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