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For Wilshire Baptist Church

City trucks have been crawling through our Embree neighborhood the past few days, slowly gathering the remains of shattered trees in the wake of last Tuesday’s storm. It’s slow, tedious work that blocks the streets and fills the air with the groans of motors and the beep-beeps of backup alarms, but it’s help we need and want so we welcome the noise and interruptions.

I mentioned the storm last week in this space and was ready to move on, but the continued rain and wind this week brought down more limbs and kept many people in the dark. At our house, we lost power for just a few hours, but our internet and cable services were out for several days and have been unreliable more than a week later. The continued rain has delayed the repair of siding pulled loose by the storm, and kept me from mowing with standing water and mud in the yard.

Continue reading “After the Storm”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

Picking up debris in the yard on Tuesday afternoon following the heavy storm of earlier that morning, I came upon a red balloon trapped in the bushes. When I reached for it, it bobbed around in my hand to reveal a message printed in black and white letters with a rolled diploma and mortarboard cap: “Congrats Grads!”

Continue reading “Congrats Grads!”

For Wilshire Baptist Church

One of the scariest words in the English language, for me anyway, is “improvisation.” And yet improvisation is a key to success in many regards.

That word came up Sunday during a “chat and chew” with Wilshire’s George Gagliardi. Lunch conversations with George almost always include some music notes, and I don’t recall the specific context, but improvisation was part of the mix. I confessed I cannot improvise at all. I can play notes on a page reasonably well, but take the page away and ask me to improvise, and I can’t do it.

Continue reading “Improvising Life”