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For Wilshire Baptist Church

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing on that Tuesday morning in September, 25 years ago? Of course you do, and so do I. We all have stories. This is mine.

I was in the car, driving into downtown Fort Worth where I worked in communications for a national engineering and architecture firm. I was listening to a morning news show on the radio when the local headlines were interrupted by news from New York: An airplane had hit the World Trade Center. That’s all they knew, and I assumed it was a small private plane. By the time I exited the highway and turned into downtown, there was an update: It was a commercial airliner. I was in radio silence from the parking garage to my office on the 40th floor, where I learned two commercial airliners had hit both towers. 

Continue reading “Remembering”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Sitting in the corner of the empty pre-K Sunday school room in the only adult chair available, I probably looked like I was in time-out, but I wasn’t. I was working on a task I had readily accepted: to untangle and separate a jumbled pile of multicolored pipe cleaners so they could be used again.

The pipe cleaners were in a pile at my feet, representing creations made by the four- and five-year-olds the week before. I couldn’t tell what they were, but there might have been chains, necklaces, crowns, ladders, animals, rockets. Some came apart easily, but some were twisted and knotted so tightly that the only way to find a point of separation was to search for the sharp ends with my fingertips.

Continue reading “Thoughts While in Time-Out”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

“Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . hold your breath . . . please resume normal breathing.”

I had an MRI recently, and those were the instructions I heard as I lay in the machine. I’ve had lots of scans so it should be routine for me, but it’s been a while and the words were muffled on the headphones they gave me – like a bad speaker at a fast-food drive-thru – so it took a couple of cycles to get into rhythm. 

As it was, it was really just “normal breathing” except that it was on cue. And except for the breath holding, which is not something we do very often because it’s unnatural. Anyone who’s ever held their breath while swimming under water or trying to suppress hiccups or trying to win a school playground contest for the breath-holding record knows it becomes uncomfortable and you start to squirm until you give in to your body’s demand for oxygen.

Continue reading “Resume Normal Breathing”