by Dr. Paul Raybon I went looking at the handwritten minutes of Hominy Baptist Church to see if there was more about the fire of 1923 than what was recorded in the official histories. (Yes, histories, when you’re 210 years old, every generation gets a swipe at telling your story). The simple entry above captured …
by Dr. Paul Raybon You may remember doing a values clarification exercise in school with this prompt. “Your house is on fire, what 10 things will you try to save?” Then a follow up, “Time is running out! You have to leave five, what will you keep?” Individual lists are then shared in a small …
By Rev. Dr. Paul Raybon One of my very favorite people, a long-time lay leader, is a retired teacher who, when she gets really mad, will exclaim “Anglo-Saxon ad infinitum.” Because as we all know, all the best curse words are Anglo-Saxon. Put another way, how many people yell “excrement” when they hit their thumb …
By Dr. Paul Raybon I have to start by confessing that I am a lover of words. I still have my crumbling 45-year-old paperback Roget’s Thesaurus, although truth be told I am more likely to consult thesaurus.com in a pinch these days. And to be precise, I am not a lover of all words, I …
By Dr. Paul Raybon Sooner or later we all grieve the loss of someone because of what we regard as their poor choices. If you live enough years and love enough people, you will endure this pain many times, and it never gets easier. There is a level of anger, resentment, and sometimes guilt, peculiar …
By Dr. Paul Raybon One of my favorite boyhood jokes goes like this: The Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by an Indian war party; they sent their horses Silver and Scout away to safety, and now were down to their last bullets. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says “I don’t think we’re …
I tell folks the angriest and most perilous moment in my career revolved around shared space. And it had nothing to do with childcare or outside groups, it was all about the parlor. A Sunday School class had redecorated an unused room for use as a parlor for weddings and funerals. It shared a door …
I’m blessed to serve in a church where the congregation sees its facilities as an opportunity for ministry. This outlook was expressed in the summary of our first Dawnings Process in 2015: God calls us to be the Center of our Community; relating, loving, and engaging with our neighbors as followers of Christ who makes …
I’m thinking this week about the issue of energy in a spiritual ecosystem. Every ecosystem is dependent on energy. In nature the ultimate source is the Sun. That energy is converted by plants into food which some animals consume directly and others consume by consuming plant-eating plant animals. Animals die and decay; energy returns to …
