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”For Wilshire Baptist Church
While taking a long walk Sunday afternoon on one of Garland’s trails, we heard the familiar cry of a red-tailed hawk and stopped to look up. There it was, soaring with its brown and white striated wings stretched out and silhouetted against the puffy white and gray clouds. We watched and listened and wondered what it was doing and why it kept crying out.
Continue reading “Flying Lessons”For Wilshire Baptist Church
While hiking the Window Trail in Big Bend National Park recently, LeAnn said, “I have to keep remembering to look up so I don’t miss anything.” I found myself thinking the same thing.
She was stating a common problem for hikers, especially when the terrain is rugged and steep. You need to keep your eyes on the ground so you don’t misstep and twist an ankle or take a tumble, but you also want to see everything you came out on the trail to see, and that definitely isn’t the dusty ground. On the Window Trail, there’s plenty to see when you look up: towering cliffs and jagged uplifts of rock; green junipers, oaks and pinion pines; bright blue Mexican jays; the pink blossoms of Mexican buckeye and desert willow; spiked prickly pear and cholla cactus; and an amazing array of rugged succulents like agave, yucca, sotol and nolina.
Continue reading “Stopping to Look Up”