Jeff Hampton – Jeff Hampton, Writer

May 15, 2025

Dwelling Places

For Wilshire Baptist Church

LeAnn and I recently celebrated an anniversary. Not our wedding day, but the 13th anniversary of the day we moved into our house, and we’re content for it to be the only house we have together this side of forever.

April 30 was the day. It was a crazy busy time: getting married after age 50, selling our two separate houses, moving most of our stuff into storage and ourselves into a small apartment, buying a vacant lot and talking Wilshire friend Steve Conner into jumping into the adventure with us as our builder. In fact, there’s a lot of Wilshire influence here with reclaimed wood floors from Pat Hicks, Barbara Floyd helping us decorate with all our stuff, and David Coleman getting our little plot of land ready for the lawn and gardens we’ve enjoyed working.

May 9, 2025

The American Pope

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Sometime around noon, central daylight savings time on May 8, a man named Robert Francis Prevost became Leo XIV. The Catholic Church has a new pope. So does the entire world – and the United States too.

I’m Baptist and not Catholic so I can’t speak to everything it means to members of the Catholic church, but I do have some thoughts about it. My late wife Debra was a devout Catholic and I waded in those waters for 25 years although I never took the full plunge. Still, I learned a lot about the church and its ways and came to respect it and admire it with both my head and my heart. For one thing, they still took faith and religious practice seriously at a time when many Christian denominations were giving in to popular culture and trends.

May 1, 2025

The Healing of Time

For Wilshire Baptist Church

It was a colossal failure — the biggest of my just-budding career: My first edition as editor-in-chief of the college newspaper was dead.

We were starting the semester with new technology and an off-site vendor to produce the paper. The formula to convert typed story drafts into typeset newspaper columns didn’t work, and the result was every story was too short. We didn’t have enough news to fill the newspaper, and it was too late at night to produce more news.