Author: Jeff Hampton

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I wrote the following words on Election Day 2010 for my personal blog before I started writing for Wilshire. 

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Today I exercised my right to vote in a very literal way: I walked the three-mile round-trip to the poll and back. Interesting what you can see from that vantage point: Well-maintained streets and car-crippling potholes. Beautifully landscaped lawns and ugly weed patches. Single-family homes, duplexes and apartments. Nice cars and dented hulks. Banners for Cowboys, Redskins, Longhorns and Sooners. Stray dogs and prissy window barkers. Young mothers with strollers and seniors with walkers. All of that and more in one voting precinct.

Continue reading “Walking and Remembering”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Sunday was Reformation Sunday around the world. It’s the day when Protestant denominations and independent churches recall the time in 1517 when monk and theologian Martin Luther nailed a list of questions and propositions regarding repentance and salvation on the door of a Catholic church in Wittenberg, Germany. At Wilshire we usually make some mention of it, but not this year. Except for an organ postlude of Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” there was not any specific mention of the Reformation, and that’s fine with me. I’ve never considered it a big flag waving day.

Continue reading “Reformed and Re-formed”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I recently spent a week in a digital fog when my computer would not boot beyond the sign-in screen. Through diagnostic programs I could see that everything was still on the hard drive; I just couldn’t get to it. And when I tried the prescribed software fixes, none of them worked. That left me with three options: take the computer to a repair shop and hope they could fix it; buy a new computer and transfer my data; or . . . gulp . . . erase the hard drive, reload the operating system, and pray that all my data was safe in the cloud.

Continue reading “In the Clouds”