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For Wilshire Baptist Church

Apparently, I touched a raw nerve last week when I commented on a photo that a pastor posted on Twitter. The photo showed him standing at a lectern and praying with his music team behind him. One of those musicians was sitting directly behind him with his legs spread. He was wearing shorts and sneakers. At first glance it looked like the pastor had on shorts. At second glance, it looked like he had four legs, two of which were bare. The main thing is it just looked peculiar.

Continue reading “Got Pants?”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

If you had just 15 minutes to grab whatever you could out of all your earthly possessions, what would you grab?

That was the impossible challenge presented last weekend to residents of the Crestview Towers condominiums in North Miami Beach, Florida. The building was evacuated and has been deemed unsafe following the horrific collapse of the Champlain Towers condo building a few miles away in Surfside. Crestview will remain closed until it can be recertified and only then after structural and electrical repairs have been made. There is some hope that the residents can return someday, but there also is the possibility that the building will be condemned as was the case for the half of the Champlain building that didn’t collapse. The Crestview residents may lose everything, so that 15 minutes when they were allowed to go back in to grab their stuff was fraught with tough decisions.

Continue reading “Grab and Go”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Watching “A Capitol Fourth” on PBS, I had a thought as the military band struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever”: they were playing the same arrangement I’ve played countless times over the years beginning in junior high school. And listening to a recording from 1909, it’s pretty much the same arrangement that composer John Philip Sousa premiered in 1897. I find a curious comfort in knowing I’ve been part of something that has been so constant.

Continue reading “Forever”