Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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I guess I’m safe. On my computer, I mean. My passwords for my online accounts are so strong that I can’t even get into half of my own accounts more than half of the time. And it takes so much time. You need “two-factor authentication,” the computer security experts say. What that means is that even if I manage to remember my password, I still have to go to my mobile phone to get the code that they send, or, for Google, head over to YouTube and tell them, “Yes, I would ver...
Large letters on a big billboard read “See The Good.” White words on a black background. Caps and lower case, just as rendered here. I don’t know who paid for the billboard ad. It’s possible there was some fine print at the bottom claiming responsibility or enlarging a bit on the three-word admonition, but I drove by too fast to notice any. “See The Good.” Almost immediately, I saw the bad. Or, at least, the wrong. Maybe you did, too. I think they messed up by capitalizin...
I’m writing this on Father’s Day. About an hour from now, it will be the day after Father’s Day. But I will never have a day when I don’t think about my father. I’ve never lived a single second of any day having to wonder if he loved me. My father was the best man I have ever known, and I’ve known some incredible men. I don’t say that with arrogance. I’m obviously stating the obvious when I ask, who has any say in whom his or her father will be? Or, for that matter, whether...
I feel like I’m writing this particular column about five months early. It’s the kind of thing that I’d normally center on just before Thanksgiving. As I write, it is not Thanksgiving. It is not November. It is mid-June. We’ve not even reached the summer solstice yet. This year, that astronomic event officially occurs at 3:14 a.m. Tuesday (MDT). Set an alarm on your phone. But it certainly feels like summer. We hit 108 degrees a day ago. The plants in my yard were droopin...
Every year during the second week of June or so, I start feeling an almost instinctive urge to head south. At first, this might seem surprising to anyone who knows me. It surprises me, too. I’m not usually particularly interested in heading south. Let me explain. I was born, and plan to live and die, a Texan. This does not mean that I’m blind to the assets and blessings of other states. I find myself longing right now, for example, for some time in the mountains of New Mex...
I’d promised myself not to write this particular column. But it’s a promise I found that I could not keep. Like anyone who has a heart and who has heard of the murders at the school in Uvalde, Texas, my heart is breaking. That kind of evil takes our breath away. Of course, the national media seem to have plenty of breath, plenty of bandwidth, and plenty of ink available. And, of course, they have to report it. But I’m not convinced that wallowing in it is necessary. Many...
In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, a chapter utterly amazing from its very first verse, we have, among much else, the story of Christ’s calling of his first disciples (apostles). Two of them did some of the greatest work of their lives right then. Andrew went and told his brother Peter about Jesus and, literally, brought him to Christ, saying, “We have found the Messiah!” And when Jesus, on the next day, himself calls Philip (who was, like Andrew and Peter, from...
“There are two ways to get enough,” writes G.K. Chesterton. “One is to continue to accumulate more and more; the other is to desire less.” If you look in my garage, you’ll quickly see that I flew past “enough” a good while back. It looks like a poorly arranged department store. I’ve got sections for automotive, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, and lawn care. I’ve got a special section for stained glass and art glass supplies, a section for sports and leisure, and a fe...
For a long time, I’ve found the study of time — specifically, how we perceive its passing, and how it’s connected to our biological and circadian rhythms — fascinating. Research rolls on, but it’s quite clear that, whether you’re a morning person, night person, or anywhere in between — a lark, an owl, a “third bird,” of whatever — your preference is not just your preference. It’s far more hard-wired biologically than we’d ever dreamed before this subject was seriously s...
“Chronological snobbery” is the term C. S. Lewis used, in his book Surprised by Joy, to describe “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” My over-simplified description is that it’s the un-examined belief that since we have come along at a later date than our ancestors, we are therefore wiser. “Years ago (and pick any time past) they used to think A, bu...
I’ve been thinking some more about this “rain thing.” I recently wrote about rain—specifically, the heart-breaking, soul-sucking, economically disastrous lack thereof. And, not long ago, I wrote a column about faith and healing, centering on the wonder-filled account in Mark 2. Jesus is teaching, and a paralyzed man is brought to him, carried on a mat by four friends. The room is so crowded that the only way they can get the man to Jesus is to cut a hole in the roof and low...
Well, if I doubted that spring has pretty much sprung where I live, all I’d need to do is take a look outside. Or just listen. (Sprung though spring may be, only newcomers here will bow to the temptation to set out plants before Mother’s Day.) But the calendar says spring. And so, as I’m writing today, does the depressing sound of howling wind. All of this means that I’m right on schedule: I’m tempted to jump the gun with my plants. And I’m sitting here writing my annual “It...
“Good Friday and Easter free us to think about other things far beyond our own personal fate,” wrote author, pastor, theologian, and modern-day martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And he continued, they liberate us to contemplate “the ultimate meaning of life, suffering, and events; and we lay hold of a great hope.” I am quite sure that when Bonhoeffer spoke of the cross and the Resurrection as “freeing” us, he did so on purpose. If I’m not mistaken, Bonhoeffer’s words above wer...
As I write this morning, I’m sitting in a comfy fold-out rocking chair on the porch of my grandparents’ old home in Robert Lee, Texas. I love being in Robert Lee. My three pastor brothers and I have been coming to this sweet little place at least twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring, for over 40 years. That hardly seems possible. I call it the Coke County Pastors’ Conference. Not only is it an incredible amount of relaxation and fun (particularly since for t...
I must confess: Modern poetry baffles me. This should not be surprising. I am an English major but of an old, fossilized, and vanishing variety. I prefer a degree plan heavy on Shakespeare and very, very light indeed on Gender & Sexuality Studies. And here, friends, is the most damning confession of all: I really prefer poetry that rhymes. No surprise, I am not much of a fan of “modern” art, either. I like colors, but I’m not terribly impressed with water balloon art. I’m f...
We’ve done this before, ya know. I’m talking about having heart palpitations when we pull up beside a gas pump. My wife and I took a three-day trip to the mountains with friends recently. That was the first time in this present petrol mess that I pumped gas that cost more than $4 per gallon. (I couldn’t tell that it performed any better than $2 gas.) But we’ve done this before. As I was getting my driver’s license back in the ’70s, OPEC was jerking us around. “The Imperi...
Rats. It’s tax time again. Of course, with all the rules and regulations, payments and estimated payments, pre-payments and governmentally approved extortion payments (the preceding is the opinion of the writer of this column and should not be construed as to express in any way the opinions of ...), it’s always tax time in one way or another. Even after you die, it’s quite possible to have your estate pilfered postmortem. Legal? Yes. Wrong? Utterly (but the preceding opinion s...
What an astounding contrast. In the midst of the sights and sounds cascading from Ukraine, I think we’ve all been struck by a stark contrast. Most of us in this world are not used to being bombarded daily with actual bombs, but we’ve become sadly accustomed to the carpet-bombing of common sense. Everything from gender to the multiplication tables is held to be incredibly fluid (“incredibly” literally means “unbelievably”). It’s as if esteeming ourselves as gods of our own “p...
Do faith healers have specialties? Doctors do, of course. I’d not be surprised to find an LDP specialist available should you need a Left Distal Phalange doctor for your port side little toe. Not that long ago, I could have used an RDP specialist for my fractured RDP, but my very excellent primary care/GP/family medicine physician and friend), since retired, was more than able to deal deftly with both left and right distal phalanges and anything else from head top to toe b...
Do kindergartners still take rest mats with them to school as the term begins each year? It was actually first grade for me when I started public school in Amarillo at San Jacinto Elementary School. I had already completed kindergarten, diploma in hand. That K for “kindergarten” was the private kind my folks paid for because they thought I could do with the “socialization.” School districts had not at that time signed on to pick up their students at the hospital the moment...
I am writing this column on Valentine’s Day. If you know me, you’ll know that few husbands in the history of the celebration of Valentine’s Day are more accomplished, more innovative, more dependably and incredibly devoted to making memories on Valentine’s Day than am I. And, if you know me, you are now laughing out loud. I admit it: I have a dicey relationship with Valentine’s Day, and my wife deserves much better in this regard than I am good at giving. The good news is t...
If you’re interested in watching a bunch of incredibly cute ants race-crawling all over themselves on a basketball court, I’d suggest finding a game featuring teams of mostly 6-year-olds. That’s the entertainment my wife and I sought on a recent Friday evening, and entertained we were! Even the refs were entertaining — and wise. I don’t think either of them ever whistled out a “walking” call, but they regularly reminded the participants that the ball needs to be bounced. And...
No surprise, some of the greatest stories the world has ever known are found in the Bible book of Genesis. And one of the best of the best is the story of Jacob (Israel) and Joseph. My wife was reading in Genesis recently, and she reminded me of something I’d forgotten. When, after a long series of amazing events in the larger story, we come to Genesis 47, we find that the old patriarch Jacob (show me a life filled with more world-class chapters!) has made the journey to E...
It’s a cold Sunday morning, and I’m warm at home, sitting in front of a great fire. This is weird. At least, for me. As a pastor, I’m usually at church on Sundays a long time before this present hour. Don’t get me wrong. If you think pastors don’t have Sunday mornings when they’d really like to sleep in, your opinion of the breed is far too high. One of my favorite cartoons shows a dear lady trying to pull the blankets off of her protesting husband as he yells, “I don’t wa...
The commonplace. There’s a lot to be said for it, I think. By the way, if you do an internet search for “commonplace,” you may be surprised to find that, for more than a few centuries, a “commonplace book” or, simply, a “commonplace” was a book or notebook in which people wrote down and kept quotations, sayings, notes of all sorts, little bits of helpful knowledge, poems, recipes, measures, verses, and much more - stuff that just seemed useful to them and worth keeping handy...
