Jeff Hampton – Page 18 – Jeff Hampton, Writer

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.

April 24, 2025

Sleep in Heavenly Peace

For Wilshire Baptist Church

During Lent and Easter at Wilshire, we’ve talked about spiritual practices: fasting, prayer, divine reading, forgiveness, sacrifice, confession and spiritual celebration. In the midst of this, I may have come upon something that isn’t usually talked about in those terms but might just be a spiritual practice that is universal: sleep. Not lazy sleep or self-indulgent sleep, but restorative sleep.

I’ve had sleep on my mind after spending time recently with Dr. Michael Scullin, director of Baylor’s Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Lab. There, he is leading research that is adding to our knowledge of how sleep impacts the functioning of our brain and thus everything we do. Bottom line: A good night’s sleep sets us up for a good life.