Jeff Hampton – Page 121 – Jeff Hampton, Writer

October 2, 2019

Courting Disaster

For Wilshire Baptist Church

The TV news tease was, “Texas grandmother helps solve yarn heist,” but it was fake news. Not the heist part, not the fact that a grandmother solved it, but the picture painted by the use of that word, “grandmother.” The mental picture is a gray-haired, feeble old woman fighting off a bandit with her knitting needles.

But that’s not the truth of the story. The woman was perfectly healthy and mentally agile. Yes, she was a grandmother, but she was 59. There was no need to say she was a grandmother. It had no bearing on the story. It’s just a word used to paint a false picture to get your attention.

September 25, 2019September 30, 2019

Home Away From Home

For Wilshire Baptist Church

What is home? I mean, what is it really? We all know the saying, “home is where the heart is,” but then that begs the question, “where is the heart?”

A piece of my heart has always been in Great Falls, Montana, where I was born while my father was in the Air Force. LeAnn and I flew into that small city last week on our way to Yellowstone National Park. She’d never been there, and I had been there just once before — twice if you count the six months that I lived there after I was born.

September 20, 2019September 20, 2019

Un-monolithic

For Wilshire Baptist Church

My parents were doing some home cleanup and asked if I wanted to keep newsletters from my time at DART. I had put them on the mailing list and they had stacked up. It didn’t take me a heartbeat to answer: “No reason to keep them. Work from the past doesn’t hold much weight anymore.”