I suppose the unexamined life is not worth living may be right for the most part. However, is it possible to have an over-examined life? In the last several years, I have been in conversations with people young and old about what it means to do something meaningful with their lives. For the young, it is mostly a question of how to invest their future years in a fulfilling and purposeful career – or series of careers. For many, this leads them to nonprofit work or social entrepreneurship as they have serious doubts about the value of either a corporate career or “menial” work. For the older, it is often…

None of us thought it would end the way it did. It began with small, almost unnoticed decisions by Mrs. Britton, our Sunday School Superintendent in the Baptist church where I grew up. Every year there was a Sword Drill competition to reward how well we had learned to locate Scripture. Standing with our closed Bibles, Mrs. Britton would call out a verse. We would throw open our Bibles and when we found the verse, step forward, recite the verse and then step back. It was the rule that the verse had to be read from the page to show we had found it and not simply memorized it. Now…

The story of Abram’s calling begins at the end of the line. If you trace the descendants of Adam through Noah and then to Terah, the line of family was about to disappear because Sarai, the daughter of the first-born of the last of Adam’s line was barren. While it had survived against great odds – it was about to be extinguished. For 1,000 years between Noah’s covenant and Abram there had been no word from The Lord. “This is the sign of my covenant” – and then silence for a millennium. I’ve wondered how they were able to live on so little from God when we expect to hear…

Twice each year the Thursday blog is a sampling of my photos with quotes. It’s that time again and I hope you enjoy both. “Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention; mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds.” – Anne Lamott ‍ “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero ‍ “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” – Albert Einstein ‍ Jeff Buford (1942-2020) “Good men don’t become legends,” he said quietly. “Good men don’t need to become legends.” She opened her eyes, looking up at him.…

In 2017 Rod Dreher published “The Benedict Option” to define the new relationship between the world and the Church allowing the Church to survive an encroaching period of darkness and the loss of a dominant position.  “We should stop trying to meet the world on its own terms and focus on building up fidelity in distinct community. Instead of being seeker-friendly, we should be finder friendly, offering those who come to us a new and different way of life. It must be a way of life shaped by the biblical story and practices that keep us firmly rooted on the truths of that story in a world that wants to…

My father had a life removed from us that we knew little about until we were grown. It was only a few years before he died that I understood why. We talked about it on a series of trips we took as father and son when he was losing his health, and we knew it was just a matter of time before he could not travel at all. It was on our first of these trips that he told me about New York City and the Waldorf Astoria. Dad grew up in the poorest parts of Nashville, Tennessee. He was always a misfit there. While others resigned themselves to a…

It’s not just me but a growing number of people have made comments about a theme running through commencement speeches for the last several years. Do what matters most to you. Find your passion and follow it. Explore your deepest self. Follow your dreams and, most importantly, find yourself. It seems that the task is to make the world a better place for you chiefly. While that sounds like a value hatched by Baby Boomers and passed along to the next generation, the roots of it are found thousands of years ago in a passage from the book of Numbers. The tribes of Israel had managed to be obedient to…

Raised a Baptist I had no exposure to what I later learned is called the liturgical calendar. We observed Christmas, Easter, Lottie Moon offering for foreign missions, and Annie Armstrong offering for home missions. Anything more would have made us less Baptist and more like our almost-Christian friends the Methodists and Presbyterians. I thought Advent was no more than National Teacher Appreciation Day or Arbor Day. Later, because my father was eclectic, we did attend Presbyterian and Methodist services now and then. I say attended because we always knew this was not real worship. The hymns were different, the pulpit was misplaced and there was no fried chicken, Training Union…

For two summers as a student I took a job in a canning factory. For nine hours every day I stood on a hard concrete floor beside a press stamping out thousands of tin can lids. My job was to inspect the seals, stack them in a metal tube, bag them, put 24 bags in a box, and shove the box down a chute. The constant din of the machinery made any conversation with each other impossible. This was long before the Walkman or iPod so we were left alone with our thoughts for hours at a time. During the 15-minute breaks the talk was about family or sports —…

A big surprise for me when we moved to Tyler was how many people here travel all over the world. I expected a relatively small town in rural Texas to be more isolated and provincial. It remained puzzling until discovering that during the Great Depression there were very few places in the country with a strong economy and liquidity. Tyler was one of them and became an early example of venture capital and private equity. Families invested in properties on every continent and while many people assume the wealth of this community is built completely on oil, a good percentage of the wealth comes from those early investments. In many…