My good friend and mentor, Charlie Kelley, passed away last week. I wrote about him in my last post knowing it was only a matter of days until he would move to his eternal home. And now, I no longer have a classic mentor…one who is one generation ahead of me, one who has seen...Read More

A few weeks ago, I received an unusual phone call from my dear friend and mentor, Charlie. Would I be willing to take over the mentoring of a young man he had befriended the past eight years? It was an extraordinary request, as I had never met the man. Blind date mentoring?  An arranged friendship?...Read More

My sister was going through some old pictures recently and found one I had apparently sent her years ago. She texted me the photo and I laughed when I saw it. It was me in 1976, on stage with a boy band…er…male quartet …I travelled the country with. The longer I looked at the pic...Read More

“Some of us wander from place to place, and many others of us don’t. We have the Somewhere people, who are very much of a place and rooted there, and we have the Anywhere people, who have a faint sense of belonging wherever they are and if they ever had a place, they left it...Read More

I was so scared of him that when I recognized his footfall coming down the stairs toward my office, I would lock the door, pull the shade, turn out the lights and hide. Did I mention I was a grown, 25-year-old man? It was my first full-time employment which, in many ways, I enjoyed. I...Read More

“My life looks way better than it feels.” Darren Waller, 31, NFL player New York Giants In his recent public announcement of his retirement, Waller noted that in walking away from a 9-year football career he was leaving more than $30 million dollars on the table and would even owe back almost $1 million in...Read More

“I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives, and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life.” David Brooks, How to Really Know a Person That might explain some things. We are not treating each other very...Read More

This past weekend I had the joy of watching our oldest granddaughter, Isabella, graduate from high school. How could she be that old????…sigh… During the ceremony, a graduate of her school gave a brief but excellent commencement address. Here is some background on him from his website: Former MLB player turned artist, Micah Johnson, is...Read More

Humility is “the mother and mistress of all the virtues”, according to the early church father John Cassian. Makes me wonder…if humility is all that important, just how much of it do I possess? Humility is in short supply. “Hubris and babble permeate the very air we breathe today”, suggests Richard Foster in his new...Read More

Like so many Americans, this past month, I got caught up in the phenomenon of women’s collegiate basketball. The energy, passion and drive of great players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso drew me in. I was a fan! Actually, I am a fan of anyone who lives from a sense of calling...Read More