History, Real Life, and Faith
With the summer weather, more skin is exposed here in California and the tattoos are coming out. Some of them are beautiful, many are intricate and astonishing. I often stop and try to figure out what they are and why folks chose that particular item. Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes I shake my head. But body art always reminds me of a…
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Seeing suffering always disturbs me. But then I read an article by Dorothy and Christopher Greco in Christianity Today which helped. They wrote wrote: “Rarely does any organization, Christian or otherwise, offer another option: that of accompanied suffering. To be transformed into the image of Christ, we must suffer as Christ did, a suffering too great for any individual to bear…
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Have you met a president? How close through playing 6 Degrees of Separation?
Your family is the best source of personal research. Start with the simple ones first: “Tell me a story.” Out of the past can come amazing tales that not only are true but are pertinent to you. If your family remembers them, they probably reverberate with emotion, too. (And if someone claims to have no memory of their childhood, I…
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I’ve spent time in Wheaton College’s Special Collections library looking through first hand research in the Oswald Chambers collection. As I read through the papers, housed in archival boxes, the archivist asked me what, specifically, I sought. “I don’t know. Just color details.” I found plenty of remarks, tossed aside comments, diary scribblings (though not in Biddy’s Bible–she wrote her notes in…
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A Madeleine L’Engle letter astonished me in 2013 at Wheaton College. I had traveled to Wheaton College’s Special Collections Library to research Oswald Chambers. While I waited for the archivist, I noticed a table full of pamphlets detailing other writers whose manuscripts and letters also were in the collection. Wheaton has quite a selection: Francis and Edith Schaeffer, C. Everett Koop,…
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