The Long Slog

Most days, VACTERL is just a pain in the ass. It’s just time consuming and it wastes your child’s time, your time and family time. There is a checklist of tasks that you must worry about every day, which normal families take for granted. But over time any set of tasks can become routine to […]

The Winter of My Discontent

VACTERL occasionally gives you a little break. Though you may have an onerous lists of tasks required to keep your child happy and healthy, you get into an offbeat rhythm that mimics normal life. You find a place of serenity and you think that you have beaten back the deadly predators. But really you are […]

Vergence, Part 3, the Practice

I start this entry by describing the best class of my undergraduate years. It was my final semester and I was taking 19.5 units. By that time, I had completed all my religious studies and I had only upper division psychology classes, including my thesis left. Oh, and one pesky general ed. class. I needed […]

Imagine, part 7

Thud! I start this posting with a quote from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It is written from the perspective of a husband to his wife. But I use it here to describe the next phase of my faith journey. Day after day, love turns grey Like the skin of a dying man. Night after night, […]

Imagine, part 3

Four Years in the Desert Young adulthood kicked off with the end of college. By some miracle, I graduated from Bethany on time with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. I wanted to go to grad school to become a therapist, but my student loan dept (modest by today’s standards) freaked me out. I needed a […]

Warped Perspective

I have a twisted relationship with the news media. I hate it. Absolutely hate it. Yet I cannot ignore it. If I go a couple of days without seeing the news, I get antsy. Watching the news is a cancer on my soul. Every night it is a concentrated dose of the worst evil that […]

Git Off My Lawn

Yes, I am becoming that guy, the old man shaking his cane at the neighborhood kids for playing in his yard. It hit me yesterday when I reread my own posting. There is a core of white hot anger at my core that has to do with the way that organized religion #$@#%!! (made sweet […]

Moo Year

Let me say up front, that I do not make New Year’s resolutions. I think trying to change your behavior because of an arbitrary date is doomed to failure. Making little changes over time that is eminently doable. So in no particular order, here are some things I would like to improve upon (that is […]

Dressing for Success

My mother taught me a lesson that has become part of the core of who I am. It was a very short anecdote from the church she grew up in. Every Easter at Glad Tidings Assembly of God, the pastor’s wife wore and old and often out of style dress. Why? She did not want […]

Memories of Thanksgivings Past

I am sitting in my darkened living room in a post turkey comma. The sounds of family playing in the other room remind me that all is right with the world. 10 years ago was probably the most memorable Thanksgiving of my life. Ethan had been scheduled for his second surgery in early November. But […]