Wilderness Wonderings...

While I enjoy writing very much, I also enjoy reading.  In fact, my love for writing has probably grown out of my love for reading.  The two are closely related, and I believe the research will bear out the relationship—those who read more will tend to be better writers; when you find a good writer, you can almost bet he or she is a reader.  So, I thought I’d bring it all together here and write some about what I’m reading! Eco has long been a noted author, know best in our part of the world for novels such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum .  In this particular work, Experiences in Translation , Eco talks about the difficulties of translation, using his own works in large measure to show us that the process of translation is a difficult, multi-layered task.  I first became aware of Eco’s interest in this area of writing when I saw his work in Mexico – Decir casi lo mismo… because that is what translation ends up being—saying almost the same th...

When we lived in Santa Catarina, Nuevo León, Mexico, we were blessed to have a large sports park about two blocks from our home. Most mornings, you would find me there early walking around that park—exercising and having my “quiet time.” On that hard packed dirt path each morning, I would walk super fast, almost to the point of running, doing what I could to maintain my physical health. What any on-looker would not see was that I was also working on my spiritual health--talking to the Lord, running by Him all that I had thought about, things I had read in the Scriptures, sermons I had heard from pastors, and things I had read in books. That time was so important as I made sense of the world, of my life and ministry, and I as strived to understand our God as best as I could. On one morning, back in September 2009, I had been wrestling especially hard to reconcile some things that I was encountering in the church we attended with some passages of Scripture that “had hold of me and would...

  When my wife laid out the question in the middle of our lunch-time discussion last week, I knew that it grew out of our own frustrations…and gave voice to the frustrations and earnest desires of many, many more.  When we sit in church and hear the preacher…then we listen to various and sometimes competing messages of contemporary Christian music on the radio…and finally we sit with our Bibles in hand, we can at times come away asking that very question—”Okay, so what does God REALLY want from me?  What does He REALLY expect of me??” The question—at least in our conversation—was centered on what the Christian life should look like.  What should our lives look like on a day-to-day basis??  How does God expect us to live??  All too often, we seem to receive these convoluted, complex designs for Christian life.  Some of the recipes for faithful Christian living call the ‘faithful’ to a life of incessant religious work—at the church every time the doo...

Well, a new year is upon us...2012. I can hardly wrap my mind around the idea that we are already in 2012. When I was a child, I recall seeing, reading articles that predicted what future life would be like. I even remember that show, Space 1999. The idea was that we would be avid space travelers by the turn of the century. Another article I recall from National Geographic proposed that we would have holiday resorts on the Moon...with hotels and shopping malls there. Obviously, none of that has come to pass...and I'm not too disappointed. In fact, it's probably a good thing we're not spreading our tainted humanity around the universe.... But, that is really neither here nor there...not the purpose of this small bit of prose. Here, I simply want to think a bit on the newness that a New Year brings to me, to many. A new year means a chance to start anew...to start over...to get a do-over. Of course, we cannot undo what we've done in the past, cannot escape the...

My first semester at South Texas College has come to a close, and it has been a wonderful time. Some of you will remember how this teaching position came about, and the miracle continues! I started out this semester with around 102 students in five classes...and ended up with some 88 students. Some moved to other sections, some withdrew from classes due to family or financial issues...and some just disappeared! That's how it is in college...so we just roll with it. Many of my students here could be classified as "second language" students. In all of these classes, I had only three "gringo" students and the rest were all Latino. I believe we've mentioned before that the Rio Grande Valley is about 92% Latino...and I certainly saw that in my classes. Because so many of them do struggle with second language issues, I was able to bring into the classrooms here the very techniques, methods and 'tricks' that I used with my students at the Teachers...

I love this time of the year. I don’t love the stores and malls and other places where people pack together to fight over sale items, or yell at their children as patience and dollars run out. I don’t love the radio stations that play back to back to back Christmas songs with all the mixed messages—“Joy to the World!” followed by “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” No, these are not the things I love. I love going to church…and today did not disappoint. As we began the time of worship together, I looked down at the bulletin and saw those words we often see and hear this time of year around God’s people—“Jesus is the Reason for the Season!” And, frankly, in this first Christmas living in the US after having lived almost seven years in Latin America, I have seen how much Christmas has become so commercialized, even de-Christianized. We hear it in the tepid and tasteless “Happy Holidays!” as we enter Wal-Mart. The quiet rebel in me responds quite purposefully, “Thank you…and Merry Chri...

Our family arrived in Guyana in 1969…and Christmas was soon upon us. At the time, the government was of the hard-lined socialist flavor, and they had severely limited any imports. As a result, Christmas trees as we know them were fairly non-existent. My parents, however, were determined to maintain some of our American traditions and practices in our home, so they made sure we had Christmas—one way or another. That first tree is burned forever into our memories. The government did have some sort of Christmas tree factory…and they did the best they could, I suppose, with the limited resources they had at the time. Basically, the tree was a modified broomstick…about three-and-a-half-feet tall, planted in a music box base that revolved and played a cheesy, plinky popular Christmas tune. The branches were little more than long bottle washers, spray-painted green. The whole tree had probably 20 of these branches…and they didn’t begin to hide the bare broomstick trunk. We had brought some d...