Author: Jeff Hampton

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Saturday morning we gave our turquoise table a fresh coat of paint in preparation for better days in the neighborhood.

In case you aren’t familiar, the turquoise table movement was started in Austin in 2013 by Kristin Schell, who one day realized she didn’t know her neighbors. She bought an inexpensive picnic table, painted it her favorite color, and put it out in her front yard where people would see it and perhaps stop to visit. The idea caught on and now there is a web site and a book and thousands of tables registered worldwide. We got our table in 2018 when Wilshire bought a few and invited folks to paint them, take them home and host events.

Continue reading “Turquoise Touchup”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I’m always embarrassed when people ask me about the books I read because I don’t read many books. One reason is that when I do read, I’m easily distracted and often have to reread something to make sure I understood what I just read. Sometimes I want to reread because I want to catch the “music” of the words if they are especially well written.

Continue reading “Staying on the Path”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Looking at the photo on the book cover — a blur of pedestrians crossing a busy city street — I wondered where it was taken. I noticed that a street sign was in Spanish, and that the buses were blue and red and the taxis were black and gold. With those fragments of visual cues loaded into an image searching site on the Internet, I found a broader crop of the same image and then the exact location: Santiago, Chile.

Continue reading “Community in the Swirl of Life”