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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.

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Did your cell phone screech or buzz at 1:20 p.m. on Wednesday? Of course it did, unless it was turned off or in airplane mode, because that was the only way to not receive the test signal of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. Apparently, everyone with a cell phone in the United States got the same screeching sound and screen message at the same time. Estimates of recipients have been stated simply as hundreds of millions, but one report says that in a country of 332 million people, there are 327 million cell phones. 

Continue reading “If I Had a Hammer”