Second Church Steps

Media coverage of Hurricane Harvey has had me checking on-line to see if the people and places of my Houston days are well.  Is St. Luke’s PCUSA on the south 610 Loop dry?  Is Northwoods PCUSA, on FM1960, up and running a relief effort? (Of course it is.) Familiar street names flash across the screen, and my heart goes back to the humid years of early adulthood.   Houston is where I weathered miscarriages and disappointments.  It is where I ventured into professional church work in Bellaire.  It is where I learned to “carol dance.”  It is also where I learned what it is to rise above the self and praise God with humility.  How do we sit with pain, anguish, disbelief, and loss? Even more, how do we help our children sit with this? We do this with prayer.  Prayers that name the pain and confess our need, give voice to hope and affirm the connectivity in Christ. Then, we lift prayers of praise—not in spite of the pain, but in the midst...

I am on the cusp of VBS, and my thoughts have turned to food.  Well, it is only natural since this year's Vacation Bible School  is about planting, gardening, seeds, and harvesting.    The Gravely Tractor and Wagon Have you heard of the “new” food approach called Farm to Table?  That is where the consumer/cook is mindful that the food on our plate is a product of the food grown on the farm.  When I was growing up, that was called, “Granddaddy’s Garden.”  My grandfather was an accountant, but in middle Tennessee that didn’t mean he couldn’t “hoe a row” in the backyard.  My grandfather’s garden was kind of “farm sized.”  It was a good acre or so and fed his household, his daughters’, and quite a few neighbors’ as well.  The string beans wound their way up the corn stalks, and there were some spots on those apples which would still burst with flavor.  Add into this mix that my grandfather had advanced glaucoma and could not s...