Bible at Home

In 2020 the State of Texas acknowledged in its Handbook of Texas, that the Karankawa Indians, the tribe that had inhabited the coast from Galveston to Corpus Christie and several miles inland more than six hundred years ago, is not in fact extinct, but has been assimilated into the State of Texas while retaining their…

A Good Story Almost buried in the Old Testament is the story of the young boy Samuel who hears the voice of God and mistakes it for the voice of his guardian Eli. It’s a story included in children’s Bibles, but seldom mentioned in sermons or in adult lesson books. It’s one of my favorite…

After St. Paul was shipwrecked off the island of Malta (Acts 27:42, 28:1-10) he left for Rome on a ship displaying the figurehead of the twin Greek gods Castor and Pollux. In one version of the story of these twins, they are identical, with the same mother but with different fathers. Pollux was said to…

“How does a whole book get inside my Kindle while I’m just sitting here?” my mother asked me. I wanted to to tell her exactly what she wanted to know, but I was as puzzled as she was, so I laughed, and said, “It’s a miracle of modern technology, Mom.” When I think of how…

When my granddaughter was three years old we went for a walk that took us through a brick enclosure where our voices produced an echo that frightened her. We talked about the echo and she said that she didn’t want to walk that way again: “When we go to the zoo, and you can show…

In the book of the First Thessalonians St. Paul writes of the end of the world and the second coming of Christ: “We who are still alive, who are left will be caught up together…in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” (I Thessalonians…

A single verse in the book of I Chronicles tells the whole story of Jabez, a man who reached high for relief from what he regarded to be a curse upon him. It was his name, Jabez, which means “Pain,” for his mother had struggled in pain at his birth. “ ‘Oh, that you would…

Aoudads are sheep with curving horns native to North Africa, but introduced on other continents and states, including Texas. They resemble hairy goats. On Monday I watched an aoudad, ( or“Barbary sheep”) bathing in Possum Kingdom Lake, while a tall white heron stood by in the water as a witness. It was a scene that…

The World is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. William Wordsworth, 1807 Alexander Bell invented the telephone in 1876. When Wordsworth wrote “The World is too Much With us”…

In the summer my oldest sister Nancy used to teach Red Cross swimming at a nearby municipal pool. It was one of her first jobs as a teenager and she took it very seriously. Half way through her first summer she came home and told us that she had discovered that praising the children for…