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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”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Child One: “Let’s take turns.”

LeAnn: “Hmm . . . so what would that look like to take turns?”

Child Two: “It would look like we were sharing.”

That was the conversation in worship care Sunday morning at Wilshire. I was sweeping cracker crumbs from under the tables while LeAnn was sitting on the floor with the seven four-year-olds who had decided it was dress-up time. Some were sorting through superhero capes and other costumes, while some were looking at a pair of fancy shoes. The problem was there were not enough shoes for each child to wear a complete pair at the same time. After LeAnn prompted them to testify about sharing, the conundrum they faced was how best to share: Does each child get a turn at wearing both shoes, or do they each get one shoe at the same time?

Continue reading “Learning to Share”