Becky and I have just finished a three-week grandparenting marathon that took us from Auburn to Memphis to Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri back to Auburn with two of our grandchildren and then to Missouri and back to return said grandchildren to their parents.  Oh, and there were children and children-in-law thrown into the mix.

We are happy to be home in our quiet house, but the wave of mild melancholy was undeniable when I went into the spare bedroom and saw the stuffed animals (from our stash) left on the unmade bed as we left early for our return trip to Missouri.

We are in a good season of life. Thanks be to God. Continue reading →

Becky and I have returned from our Memphis to Missouri grandparent run (with two grandchildren still with us until next week when we make the return trip to Missouri).  It was and is a wonderful way to spend some hot summer days.

On the trip from Missouri with Esther and Gideon, we listened to C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”  Such familiar and good words.  What joy to know of the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.

Back in Missouri the literary tastes of almost-three-year-old Micah tended toward the story of Fireman Small and, new to me, “The Little Blue Truck.”  I may have had the story of Fireman Small read to me when I was three.  “The Little Blue Truck” is one of those children’s books with a message for its three-year-old audience.  In the story, Blue, the little truck, is always a good friend to the farm animals he meets on the road.  One day Big Dump, an arrogant and proud truck with important things to do, rumbles down the road ignoring horse, cow, duck, goat, sheep, and chicken.  When he gets stuck in the mud, there is no one to help – save Blue who summons his friends to push and shove until Dump is free from the mud. Continue reading →

Grandchildren are the crown of the aged,
and the glory of children is their fathers.

Proverbs 17:6

Yes.

The patient’s health had not been good for a long time, and now it seemed as if all the different concerns had conspired against him.  To treat one issue was to aggravate another. The physician was so attentive to the needs of the patient and caring for his wife.  But the weight of disease had become too much for the fragile life to bear.

Being present at the time of death is both an obligation and a privilege of the pastor’s calling.

When the patient died, it was more than a professional disappointment for the physician. Her sorrow seemed genuine, and you could see the compassion in her eyes as she turned to the wife.  Unfortunately, she did say something self-justifying about having done all she could and how sick he was when he was admitted to the hospital, but mostly she was trying to convey comfort to the just-now widow.  She did not use the word, however.  She did not say “died” or “death.”

“Mary, Bob is dead,” I said, simply because Mary was not able to understand the kind but veiled words the good doctor was using.  And then grief flooded that small room in the ICU. Continue reading →

with inflection points

“Our nations and our world stand at a genuine inflection point in history,” President Biden said during his recent trip to Europe as he addressed a group gathered to talk about a global technology initiative.

Genuine or not, I am tired of inflection points.

For the past couple of years everyone has been talking about inflection points, and I think we need to quit using the term, whatever it means.

What is an inflection point? The website mathworld, one of my favorites, describes it as “a point on a curve at which the sign of the curvature (i.e., the concavity) changes. Inflection points may be stationary points, but are not local maxima or local minima.” The site goes on to say, “the first derivative test can sometimes distinguish inflection points from extrema for differentiable functions f(x). The second derivative test is also useful. A necessary condition for x to be an inflection point is f^(”)(x)=0. A sufficient condition requires f^(”)(x+epsilon) and f^(”)(x-epsilon) to have opposite signs in the neighborhood of x .”

I may have missed that in the calculus class I did not take. Continue reading →