Serve by Design

Our thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Eloise, is blossoming into a beautiful young lady. She has a smart mind, intuitive emotional make-up, and a loving spirit with her siblings. She is a good friend to several girls in her class and is growing in her spiritual life. She attends church, participates in the youth program, and regularly volunteers her time for service opportunities. Her favorite summer service is teaching younger children during Vacation Bible School! Her daddy, Mimi, and Poppi, too, are proud of the Christian young person she is becoming! The Sunday Invitation! Image credit: pinterest.com This precious grand keeps connected with her friends at school, during track practice, and after-school phone calls. But, she really enjoys those frequent in-person social events that include sleepovers. She recently had a sleepover at her dad’s house with a special friend. The girls spent Saturday night in the downstairs game room with technology and comfy lounge couches. Then, they ...

( Today’s guest blog features my grandson, Klay. These edited devotional remarks were shared during a worship service in a nearby senior living facility.) “Good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking you all for having me here today. It’s truly a blessing to be with you and to have the opportunity to share. My name is Klayton Michael DeFrees. I’m fifteen years old, and I’ve been told many times that I have an old soul! I’m the oldest of four siblings, and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, about eighteen hours from here. I’m home for the holidays, spending time with the family I love very much, and I’m grateful to be here with all of you. My Poppi asked me to share a devotion today, and it’s an honor to do so. Klay & Poppi Making Big Plans! This afternoon, I’d like to reflect on a few lessons the Lord has been teaching me over the past year, and then look ahead together at how we, as the Church, can step faithfully into what God has prepared for us in the year to come.  ...

Like me, some of you may be fascinated by numbers. My love of math goes back to sixth grade and a before-school tutoring session with my teacher/principal, Mrs. Martha Ortegren. For several weeks, she gave up her prep-time to “catch me up” on some math skills so I could join the advanced group in our class. I will never forget her patience, encouragement, and how this built up my confidence as a student. Mrs. Ortegren believed in me and knew that I could do the work! Image: vecteezy.com While I never became a mathematician, I do think I passed some of my love of numbers off to one of our daughters, who is a math teacher today. Our eldest son, who is a public policy “wonk” also has an aptitude for math and recently took two challenging seminars in statistics from Harvard. A few years ago, one of our grandsons blew us away with a near perfect grade in his high school statistics class! Do you have a favorite math fact? I still love to recite 8 lines of Chaucer in old English, especially...

During forty-five years of fulltime active ministry, I planned and/or participated in numerous “guy events” that involved lay and clergy training, inspiration, and fellowship. In an effort to anchor these occasions in some of the memories of my readers, I will list just a sample of the settings, The camp-times would include Riverbend (Glen Rose, TX), Trinity Pines (Trinity, TX), Lake Sallateeska (Pinckneyville, IL) and Emmanuel (Astoria, IL). There were other retreat settings that included a ranch house First Baptist owned (Houston, TX), the Lady of the Snows Catholic facility (Belleville, IL), and the Assemblies’ Lake Williamson (Carlinville, IL). Truthfully, the additional places and occasions were too numerous to list! Image credit: depositphotos.com I have so many special memories where my relationship with friends and church leaders was deepened through guy-gatherings that often involved evening fish fries, cooking breakfasts over a modest cook-stove, and sleeping (or trying to!) ...

We are blessed to have a few mature trees on our .55-acres of property. There is a beautiful, tall, and stately pin oak tree and an equally sized and healthy silver maple that define the backyard. During spring, the oak produces catkins or tassels that collect on the driveway like manna during the time of Moses! These are messy, quite fragile, and crumbly pollen structures that fertilize the female flowers. While these “mossy gatherings” require about a week of daily sweeping, they are relatively easy to rake or sweep into piles that can be gathered into the yard waste container before they get tracked into the house. From Seed to Maple Sapling! The silver maple produces the entertaining “helicopters” or “whirlybirds” These seeds, with fin-like wings, take flight in the wind and scatter into the yard becoming a food source for squirrels that are waiting for more substantial seeds and nuts later in the fall. Their scattering destinations include flower beds, box garden areas, guttering ...