Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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How’s this for the setting for a series of mystery novels? It’s 12th-century England. Following a long career as a soldier and later as a ship’s captain, a short but sturdy Welshman, who still rolls a bit when he walks as if he were still at sea, has “taken the cowl.” Kind and wise, he has taken vows as a monk in a Benedictine monastery where he is in charge of the “herbarium,” growing all sorts of herbs and vegetables from which he blends healing ointments and medicines. Of...
There’s a big problem brewing down under. Free speech. Religious liberty. Political correctness. Employees’ rights. Employers’ rights. Contract law. If those are just a few of the spokes on the spinning wheel, picture a monkey wrench being shoved right into it. Yep. It’s a wreck. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Rhiannon Hoyle (July 1), Rugby Australia has fired one of the most famous sports figures in Australia and shredded his multimillion-dollar contrac...
My younger friend laughed after worship a few years ago. “Preaching with you in the congregation made me nervous,” he said. Completely surprised, I laughed back: “Are you kidding?” It was a rare Sunday for me, one when I was both away from my own pulpit and not preaching or singing elsewhere. My friend had done a great job preaching, and I don’t know any pastor whose work in a community I respect more. I’ve preached on occasions when I was nervous myself because I knew a vete...
Freedom. It is not a gift any government benevolently bestows upon its citizens; freedom is the gift of God to everyone created in his image. It is the responsibility of governments to recognize and protect the freedom that is already the birthright of those given life by their Creator. It’s a blessing to be able to celebrate on July 4 the birthday of a nation “conceived in liberty.” It’s good for us all to think about the nature of freedom. For those of us who bow before...
I still miss Andy Rooney. Where’s the old curmudgeon when you need him? Rooney’s commentary at the end of “60 Minutes” was always the cream of the show. (Speaking of dairy, I still thank him for pointing out that milk that a cow would claim is just 3.2% fat; I’ve never touched 2% or “skim” since.) After his death in 2011, five weeks after his last television commentary (number 1,097), the man has been irreplaceable. Go to commercial. It’s over. One of my favorite types...
Believe me, I write this column as no sort of spiritual giant; I don’t know my own weakness as well as I should, but I surely know it enough to see warning signs pop up everywhere when I’m tempted to feel self-righteous. And here comes that dangerous word: but. But surely anyone with any spiritual sensitivity at all doesn’t have to look long at our society to see that we are, as I heard someone put it, constantly swimming in a sea of selfishness. We do well to consider also...
To be truly meek is to be truly strong. The Bible says regarding one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known that the man Moses was the meekest of all the men on the earth. But in the Hall of Fame of Meekness (call it the Hall of Fame of Humility, if you wish), I’ve been privileged to know several individuals who deserve to be included. Among the greatest of the humble, in my opinion, was my father. If you’ve been blessed to have such a father or grandfather or men...
Everybody dreams. Or so the sleep experts say. I feel most refreshed when I wake up with no memory of dreaming during the night. I feel most exhausted when I had a bad or intensely frustrating dream, got up a time or two in the night, and each time was launched right back into the same past-midnight mess. If I remember what I learned in some long-ago psychology class — maybe I just dreamed this — we all dream during sleep, but the only time we remember the dreams is when we...
A strange story it is, and enough to make a math or accounting major bite nails. I’m talking about Jesus’ “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” (Matthew 20:1-16). Here’s the story in a nutshell: It’s grape harvest in Palestine. A vineyard owner goes out early to hire men to work in his vineyard, and he agrees to pay them a denarius, a normal day’s wage. They go to work. At 9 a.m., he finds other men standing around in the marketplace and also hires them, promising to pay th...
“Happiness is worth a lot to me,” a good friend, colleague, and mentor once told his boss as he made a decision that would lead to his leaving the company. “Well, so what? Isn’t happiness worth a lot to everybody?” his boss replied. “No,” my friend replied truthfully and I think with unusual wisdom, “it is not — not to everybody.” I’ve thought of that exchange often. My friend’s words may mean more when I tell you that he is very motivated and one of the better businessmen...
Some moments in life are golden. And some of the best of all are precious precisely because they must be savored immediately or forever lost. Oh, as long as God is our Father, and that’s forever, beautifully sweet moments, joy surprises and cloud bursts of delight will come again. But never again the same one, for much of their rich sweetness and deep joy sparkles in the diamond — truth that no two of them are exactly alike. None can be bottled to be uncorked and re-...
Sunday is Mother’s Day. May I hasten to say that having a Mother’s Day is a good thing. I am sincerely pro-Mother’s Day and pro-moms. Good ones deserve far and away more honor than they receive, and I’m happy to have some part in helping bestow some of that honor. But as a preacher who has stood in the same pulpit now for 34 years, I’m finding that preaching on Mother’s Days is getting a bit harder. It’s my own lack of imagination, I know, but I quickly preached most of the r...
You should probably drink a lot more water. It’s our age’s most oft-recited quasi-medical mantra. Never mind that most of us have long thought that the human body came equipped with an “idiot light” on the dashboard that flashes “You Are Thirsty!” to be sure we don’t miss the signal that we are when we are. Thirsty, that is. In need of liquid sustenance. Maybe even ... water. As precious as water is — far more precious than oil — you have to be really thirsty for it to...
Tax Day 2019 has come and gone. It’s actually just Tax Filing Day since every day is a tax day and, if you somehow still manage to own a business or be self-employed, you’ll have several more lesser but still taxing opportunities. As disheartening as Tax Day always is, April 15, 2019, was far more depressing than usual as we watched in grief and horror as Notre Dame Cathedral burned. That day was also decidedly disheartening for many employees who file what passes for a sim...
More than a few writers have talked about the place where joy and sorrow meet. In a moment of deep contentment, someone may say, “I’m so happy I could cry!” And in the moments of deepest and most unutterable joy, we say nothing at all. We don’t live long before we learn that tears are more precious than diamonds, and the best tears are tears of joy. When those joy tears come, we usually don’t analyze them; we live the moment. But if the time comes to talk about such moments,...
Have you noticed? When something bad, sad, and tragic happens, we agonize, “Dear God, how could you allow this?” But, too often, when we see something bad, sad, tragic avoided, we fail to give thanks. If you are my auto insurance agent or my wife, please stop reading in 3-2-1. Now. I like San Antonio. But a few weeks ago, we headed that way, were almost there, rounded a bend on the wet expressway, and were greeted to a sea of red brake lights much too close that I saw alm...
Here’s a riddle for you. It’s one that intrigues and gives me pause about this same time every year. Two men, two mouths, both tongues betray, almost but not quite on the same day. One fails and weeps, shinnies up and up and falls putrescently; one fails and weeps, bows down and down and rises taller, finally, than before his perfidy. Love’s victory! Who are they? I’m neither a poet nor the son of a poet, and not much riddle-writer at all. But onward I hint. Two men. Two wor...
Sometimes the main event is not the main event. A couple of times a year I usually receive article requests, three at a time, from a great little daily devotional magazine. As with all of their writers, the editors pick two Scripture passages for me and I get to pick the third. So when I received the request letter a few weeks ago, I wasn’t surprised. I opened it, perused the assigned passages, and saw that one was 1 Samuel 17:16-28. That’s a good one. Or, to be entirely acc...
“I see dead people.” So said the cute little boy in the memorable line and creepy “confession” from the 1999 movie “The Sixth Sense.” I hope you don’t find it disturbing when I affirm that I do, too. See dead people, I mean. For me, it happens pretty often and worries me not at all; in fact, it warms my heart. It gives me real hope. And I find it genuinely encouraging to know that I’ll one day join them. In our small town of Muleshoe, it’s not that unusual for me, a pastor her...
“Come,” invites the Psalmist of old, “let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song.” (95:1-2). C.S. Lewis writes, “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” Some years ago my wife and I were in New Orleans where she was attending a training conference....
“Just try harder!” urged the ladybug. “I am trying,” protested the stressed-out caterpillar. “And I’ve been trying for hours! So far the only thing that’s happened is that I got so dizzy a few minutes ago I almost fell off my leaf. “If I’d fallen, I’d surely agree that some wings would’ve come in handy. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and if caterpillars could sprout wings by holding their breath and pushing with all their might, I’d have wings that would make m...
It’s very nearly as weird-feeling as it is heart-rending — a day when you wake up and realize it’s just another ordinary day for most of the world around you, but your whole world has tilted in its orbit, shifted on its axis. For you, almost nothing feels the same, and even the things that do, don’t. Their very sameness in this new universe renders them incredibly strange. You brush your teeth just like you always have. Part your hair in the same place. Take your keys off the...
In Luke 5 we find the story of the calling of the first apostles. To get a little space from the crowd, Jesus has turned Simon Peter’s fishing boat into a pulpit, pushed out from the shore, teaching the people from the boat. When Jesus finishes speaking, he looks over at Simon and, I think, with a twinkle in his eye, he says, “OK, Simon, you’ve indulged me as I’ve turned your boat into a lectern. Whaddaya say we make it a boat again? Put out into the deep water and let down yo...
Uh oh. It seems that the date for this column should probably indicate its content. Rats! If the whole thing reads like it was written by a Valentine’s Day grinch, I should just plead guilty. It’s almost certainly good for husbands like me to have a deadline that calls for something on the order of flowers, gifts, candy, seriously over-priced cards, etc. I have difficulty appreciating the Madison Avenue manipulation, but I don’t doubt that clods like me need the shove. It’s...
You probably didn’t notice a wobble in the Earth’s rotation, a split-second tilt in its axis, a brief cosmic stutter last Wednesday. Neither did I. But when I learned later that a sweet lady in Amarillo named Melba Joy had passed away suddenly that day, I immediately felt an emptiness in my soul, a pain in my heart, and a deep sense of loss. And I confess to being irrationally surprised that this planet could sustain that kind of loss and keep spinning as the solar system car...
