Truth and Grace Above All Else

Under Water Sharks in the water If you were to ask my mom how much I enjoy being in the water, she would say something to the effect of, "He is a fish.". Needless to say, I love swimming and being in the water on a hot summer day. I loved the water so much that one time I spent a little to much time in my backyard pool one afternoon. I ended up with a lobster red back and could not sleep on my back for two days. That was not fun, but that is not the story I came here to tell you today. The story that I want to tell you is about how my innocent game of playing a shark nearly ended tragically.  During my teenage years, I took every opportunity to go on little trips with my church's youth group. One of my favorite trips during the end of the summer was going to a water park for the day. Being the fish that I am, this was a blast for me. It also let me release my inner kid while I was splashing friends left and right. As a group, we would typically go on the wat...

Boom When I was younger, I was obsessed with army men, tanks and things that went boom. I loved the Fourth of July. Me and my brother would walk almost a mile one way to the only gas station in our town to buy fireworks with change we had collected. Once I had used up most of the change I had collected, I would use my money from doing chores around the house. I didn't understand the concept of throwing away my money back then, but I think when you are eight to twelve years old, you don't really care about the value of money, you just care how much it can buy you. A dollar could buy me five packs of those snapper things that you throw on the ground and they make a sharp pop. Me and my brother would have competitions to see how many of these snappers we could throw in one handful in order to get the coolest noise off the surface of our driveway. I think we set an unofficial record of five boxes in one handful. It was cool for the second that it lasted for all of them to hit ...

Inside or out? When I was younger I used to have friends that lived in my small farm town in rural Indiana. My town was one of those that no one outside of a forty-five mile radius even knew about. So, needless to say, it was and is to this day very small. Being a small farming community, almost everyone knew each other and everyone's kids would go to the local playground and mess around on the rickety, rusty and ramshackle playground equipment. If someone brought a basketball that was a huge plus! Then you could actually use the basketball court with grass growing through the cracks of the cement. Be careful though, there was no padding on the pole that held the hoop with no net in place.  Every once in awhile you and your friends would end up at this conspicuous place we called a playground. You would get to sit on the picnic tables under the pavilion and talk for hours about baseball and bottle rockets. Typically the only thing that drove us out of this watering hole was ...