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For Wilshire Baptist Church

Sunday morning on the way to church, LeAnn asked if I ever sang the song “Over the River and Through the Woods” as a kid. I said I did, and then we pieced it together from our memories and began to sing it:

Over the river, and through the woods,


To Grandmother’s house we go;


The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh,


Through the white and drifted snow.

Over the river, and through the woods,


Oh, how the wind does blow!


It stings the toes and bites the nose,


As over the ground we go.

Continue reading “Over the River and Through the Woods”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Some weeks crawl along or breeze by with nothing remarkable happening, and then some will make your head spin and mess with your breathing. This week has given my lungs a workout.

It started on Monday when we had lunch with my cousin Katherine – my second cousin, actually. My parents had no siblings, so I have no first cousins. But, by a quirk of spread-out births among my grandfather and his brothers, my father’s cousin Katherine is exactly my age. We didn’t grow up knowing each other, but we started at Baylor in the same classroom on day one, sat together alphabetically on commencement day, and we enjoyed getting to know each other during the four years in between.

Continue reading “Inhale . . . Exhale”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

The Nextdoor social media app is packed with information – some interesting and useful, some trivial or just weird – and then there are questions about the who, what and how of navigating life in the community. Such as this recent post: “Hey guys, am I able to just walk into a church on Sunday? And if so, what are times they usually start so I can be on time?”

At first I thought it was a joke, because having been raised in the church, I take it for granted that everyone knows the answers: Yes, you can just walk in on Sundays, and 11 a.m. is prime time for most everyone. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the questions are evidence of the decline in the once-pervasive influence of the church in our society.

Continue reading “Opening Doors”