Serve by Design

This spring has marked another epic chapter for our family. Two more of our grandchildren are now gainfully employed with part-time jobs! Klay, fifteen-years-old, is making pizza, subs, and salads at Dion's in New Mexico, and seventeen-year-old, Cam is taking orders (via the speaker!) for chili dogs, smash burgers, and shakes. He is also serving as an occasional carhop, cleaning the ice cream machine, and doing other duties as assigned at the Sonic Drive-In. Leander, Texas. The grands are growing up and moving on! Cam, Our Sonic Man! Cam took to his new job like the proverbial “duck to water!” He has been flexing his “cooking muscles” since taking Culinary Arts during his sophomore year. He received a “Food Handler’s License” after completing the class. At home, he can manage the toaster oven and any pan like a professional! Made from scratch Cheddar Bay Biscuits and Fettuccine Alfredo with homemade noodles are his specialties! There is another dimension of fast-food restaurants ...

Our grandsons, Klay and Karter DeFrees, just participated in a Memorial Day service project at their local cemetery in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Churches and schools have promoted the value of such projects to encourage students to “give back” to their communities. Our guys are active in their youth program at Paragon Church. I’m so proud that these beloved grands always “stand in the ready” to help and serve when given the opportunity! Klay and Karter - hard at work! Their church recently featured the guys with this “shout out” on the church website: “Today, two of our youth (Klay and Karter) joined Bob Monclova and Jim S. to clean eight hundred veteran head stones during six hours of service on Memorial Day. Karen, from Daniel’s Family Funeral Home, shared these comments, ‘The guys from Paragon were amazing, respectful, patriotic, and hard working! Thank you gentlemen for honoring our fallen vets!’” There was a moment of levity that Klay, our fifteen-year-old, shared with me about wh...

More than thirty-three years ago, we moved our family to central Illinois and bought our second home. This modest ranch-style house is situated on a half-acre corner lot and has five mature trees, numerous shrubs and flowering bushes that serve as habitat attracting a variety of birds and small animals. One of the most prized of our collection is the stately Rhododendron that always has a bird nest or two each season. If I get too close to the bush during spring cleanup, I hear squawking that warns me that anxious mother birds are protecting baby hatchlings! May Celebration Time! Every May this native Rhododendron puts on a magnificent display of flowering beauty. The variety of our Rhododendron has purple flowers that attract early pollinators to the trumpet-shaped flowers with their brilliant petals and multiple stamens in perfect symmetry.. There are times when I’d like to trim and prune this large plant back. But then, I think about how often we have used the Rhododendron as a back...

I recently participated in a three-day training event for Illinois State Police chaplains. It is a privilege to serve alongside thirty volunteer chaplains throughout the state. We serve the commanders, troopers, and public as needed for support, ceremonial functions, and during emergency crises. While we train online quarterly, we have not been able to meet in-person since the Pandemic. This return to normal is what made this gathering a little more special! Bedding Perfection! This event was an important time of team building, classroom discussion, CPR recertification, and touring by van to the various ISP facilities that included central command downtown, the training academy near Chatham and the Pawnee shooting range where we saw a demonstration of the elite K9’s and their trainers in action, and also a demo of the precision driving required to navigate the Emergency Vehicle Operation’s course. We also toured the cadet barracks at the academy and observed their regimented para-mil...

I recently had a confusing moment as I quickly entered a farm and home supply store where I serve as a workplace chaplain. I thought I saw a small table with a bucket of pork rinds on it (one of my favorites and my dad’s, too!) and didn’t pay any attention to the poster nearby. The experience had me thinking, “How nice! They are providing another complimentary snack for the customers like the free popcorn by the checkout counter!” These Are NOT Pork Rinds! 😮 When I backed up to read the poster and looked more carefully into the contents of the tin bucket, I could clearly see that I had completely misunderstood. The snack was a quantity of pig’s ears to keep pet dogs entertained while their owners did some shopping! There is a substantial difference between pig’s ears and pork rinds! Years ago, President George W. Bush from Texas leaked to the media that he loved to snack on pork rinds. Almost immediately, the demand at grocery stores soared for bags of the President’s favorite snack! ...

Just the other day, I watched a humorous interview with a preteen. This occurred on an afternoon entertainment news program. What caught my attention in this brief and show-ending feature was that this youth was explaining her bad attitude while riding in the passenger seat of the family car. She was speaking to one of her parents as she made this adult-like excuse, “I’ve been crotchety since I was nine!”  Image: freepik.com I have enjoyed watching the Grumpy Old Men movies (1993, 1995) several times. The original film featured three of my favorite actors: Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, and Ann-Margret, It’s a story of two men, Max Goldman and John Gustafson who are neighbors and lifelong friends that find themselves competing for the affections of a beautiful woman,   Ariel Truax, who lived across the street from both men, Matthau and Lemmon with deadpan humor do a masterful job of bringing their characters to life in an uproariously funny and absurd way! I’ve had my own grum...