Author: Jeff Hampton

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I was working upstairs at my desk on Wednesday morning when LeAnn came up to report on our fall tomatoes. It had been a few days since she had inspected the crop, and when she came upstairs, she had news. Not only were the plants teeming with green tomatoes thanks to the cooler weather, but they had attracted their greatest nemesis. A few minutes later, I was in the garden with LeAnn hunting the evil that is the tomato hornworm.

Continue reading “Hiding in Plain Sight”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

“Are you having a good day?”

That’s a question Thelma Kite likes to ask many of those who cross her path, whether a longtime friend, a grocery clerk, a doctor or a salesman at her front door.

It’s a brilliant question when you think about it, because it’s not as open ended and thus open to a brush-off answer as the more usual, “How are you?” Thelma’s question – “Are you having a good day?” – invites a conversation, because whether you answer “yes” or even “no,” it prompts a follow-up of, “Tell me about that” or “Why is that?”

Continue reading “Sharing Our Days”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

With Israel and Hamas in the throes of a new war and Ukraine and Russia battling toward two years of the same, I am at a loss for anything meaningful or worthwhile to write about. 

It seems tone deaf to write about anything joyful, light or fun when cities are burning and people are dying. The breaking of our summer heatwave, fall football and the sights and sounds of the state fair don’t seem like suitable topics right now. And, it feels petty to devote any sentences to my personal concerns, whether it be the aftermath of cancer treatments, fatigue from our national political divide or frustration over our community failures.

So maybe the best thing to do is just be silent for a while. Sometimes it is in silence that prayers can best be born in the soul and find their way to the heart and out onto paper or up into the air.