Author: Jeff Hampton

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I love history, especially when there is some mystery involved. Like, what’s the story behind the brick wall behind our house? I also like the way history can point toward the future.

Our back property line is marked by a long, low brick wall that probably dates back to the first house built on the site in the early years of the 20th century. At 38 feet long, the wall doesn’t stretch the full length of our back yard, and at only 16 inches tall, it’s not going to keep anything in or out. So it has no function other than as a piece of landscape architecture from the past, and yet the wall is a prized possession, the answer to a chronic question, and perhaps a key to the future.

Continue reading “Brick by Brick”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

The Labors of our Days

We’ve been working a lot of jigsaw puzzles during the pandemic. We usually have one going at our house and one at the house of Thelma Kite, LeAnn’s mother. Thelma gets exasperated sometimes when I walk around the table, pick up a piece, and drop it precisely into place. “Oh, stop that,” she’ll say jokingly, and then, “LeAnn, Jeff doesn’t play fair.”

Continue reading “The Labors of our Days”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Two weeks ago, I wrote in this space about asterisks and how I used to bang them out on my grandfather’s Underwood typewriter. That typewriter sits on my grandfather’s desk in one of our guest rooms here in Garland, but both typewriter and desk originally sat in his home in Orange, Texas. And as you may have seen in the news last week, Orange took a major hit from Hurricane Laura.

Continue reading “Prayers of the People”