Blog – Page 34 – Jeff Hampton, Writer

June 9, 2022

Hotlines and Lifelines

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I called a telephone hotline for the first time in my life. It was the Dallas Coyote Hotline.

It started on an early Thursday morning. I was sitting in traffic when a coyote darted across Lovers Lane and then Skillman Avenue and disappeared into an apartment complex. I tried to get my phone camera up but I wasn’t quick enough. A few hours later, I remembered that Dallas has a new coyote hotline so I gave it a call. They let you know up front that you have to leave a message, so I did with the basic time/date/place details they asked for as well as my phone number.

June 2, 2022June 2, 2022

Another Pentecost Moment

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I try to write something new in this space every week, but with Pentecost Sunday coming this weekend, I want to share something that I’ve said before.

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As much as I love our pastor and all of those who preach, pray, and lead us in worship on Sunday mornings, the priests at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris get extra credit for doing all of that while hundreds of tourists mill around looking, talking, and taking pictures.

May 27, 2022

This is Not a Drill

For Wilshire Baptist Church

In grade school in North Texas in the late 1960s we had three emergency drills: fire, tornado and bomb. That’s all we kids had to worry about aside from bad grades or being sent to the office for acting up.

We had fire drills because buildings have burned down ever since humans learned how to make fire. We had tornado drills because we’re at the southern end of “tornado alley” and tornadoes can spin up whenever the temperature shifts quickly from cold to hot or vice versa. The bomb drills were a remnant of the cold war fear that the Soviet Union might try to start World War III. That drill eventually went away, and tornado drills also faded as meteorological science improved the ability to forecast storms hours in advance. In fact, today schools sometimes will send kids home early or delay the start of school if bad weather is in the forecast.