Christ United Methodist Church is playing the most expensive game of beat the clock it has ever played. Three weeks from now, on Mother's Day, the church wants to hand over $10 million to the owners of Freestyle Music Park to purchase the property wh…
I think God would present Himself as a healthy flourishing oak in rich soil, giving rest and strength. He chose to present Himself in His Son, like a root as good as dead in dry dirt. This is how the greatest prophecy of Jesus begins. We find him in that…
Imagine you are walking along the quiet ocean early one morning and you see something tangled in seaweed floating in the waves. Perhaps it is a fish, a dead sea animal or bird. As you get closer you must know what it is. You must name it. It is not enoug…
This is my last night without the boys coming home, so I needed to write. I need hours of uninterrupted time to unleash words like doves. Some one said thoughts get untangled when they pass through your fingers unto paper. Hearing about your divorce proc…
During the Christmas season, living in Myrtle Beach as a single woman just wasn't my best option. However, the things I believed early on put me in a prison that made being independent look very attractive. Husband #1: The church. Growing up in the S…
Is God real? Does prayer work? Or is prayer just a polite community exercise read regularly at civic meetings to create order and tradition, offered up to some random and distant God? Phil Render Mike Chestnut Myrtle Beach City Councilmen and City Manage…
I had lunch with a man kidnapped for seven years by the FARC guerillas. Most of his clothes rotted off him. When the Colombian army rescued him, he said the ride home on the helicopter was gorgeous. The whole day was heaven: hugging his family, taking a …
While waiting for my younger son to come out of surgery, a doctor I met for two minutes is cutting through his boyish flesh. I wonder if the doctor’s marriage is happy, and if he had a good evening last night, and does he have a son in trouble? How…
The teacher showed the students how to paint a tree: she crayoned a green circle stuck on a brown stick and said, “This is a tree. Now take your crayons and draw one.” Danny knew trees. He almost lived in trees. He climbed them, swung from th…
Age falls everywhere, but you never see it. I went home to visit my 92 year-old mother where the evening is so soft and pastel, and friends are so old. And who are these kids who think they are the first to be here? They think we have always been old, bu…
