“We are all in pain, we choose to suffer.” I remember, as a teenager, my father spending hours in the yard landscaping as an escape from the vagaries of pastoring a church. I always think of him as the bishop’s troubleshooter in the local United Methodist conference. On behalf of the church, he led civil […]
A Matter of Acceptance – Part I Read More »
I set up the camera and let it roll. In her kitchen. In rural Iowa. August, 1993. Over the next two hours my eighty-four-year-old friend, without hesitation, without probing, without concern, spoke…about her itinerant life and the struggles of share-cropping, about the infidelities of her husband, his alcoholism, their divorce—and their remarriage the following year,
Fanny Out of the corner of my eye, as I passed her room in the health center, I caught a glimpse of Fanny staring blankly at the wall. She attended chapel every Sunday, but she had been missing that day. I stopped, knocked on the open door, and asked if she was all right. Still
