“I died?” I asked. Surprisingly the notion didn’t fill me with fear. I had always expected my death to be a gruesome affair. Honestly, though, it went pretty well, all things considered. I had slipped away sometime between the french fries, and the hamburger. I was eating lunch, I think. It is a little hazy […]

My wedding day began with me and my dad stealing a truckload of bamboo. Kristah wanted an arbor of greenery that we could stand under for the ceremony. Like always, I had waited until the last moment.  "There's some!" I shouted as we rolled down the road in Dad's truck. I hopped out, machete in […]

"You want to come over tomorrow?" I asked Kristah on the phone.  “Sure,” she said happily.  "Ok. Bring shoes and jeans, because I want to show you the new trail I cut in the woods," I said as if it were just another of my bizarre projects born of long hours alone in among the […]

As the invitations to speak dried up, I began to realize that I needed the break. I had to gather my thoughts and reconsider everything. It was brash of me to think that I was ready to talk publicly about something so new to me. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of questions that I needed […]

Although I had officially exited vocational ministry a few years earlier, I still occasionally received invitations to speak at church-sponsored events. In the south, there is a tradition called 'See You At The Pole.' Christian students gather around the flag pole of their school and pray for their friends, teachers, and a host of other […]

"Have you ever heard of free grace theology?" I asked my friend Teddy. Free grace was what I had learned to call the theological outlook which I had now adopted. I was finding it difficult to explain to my old friends what my new perspective was. Teddy was a pastor in his late fifties. He […]

Kristah and I had been dating for a while when she asked me to join her for a Bible conference in Dallas. It was the annual meeting of the Grace Evangelical Society. I had never heard of the group, but I would later come to find out that they are an organization that has spent […]

Dating Kristah was unlike any other experience I have ever encountered. Most of the relationships I had with girls had been fraught with uncertainty and unwanted drama. I grew up with only brothers, so the vagaries of the feminine mentality were mysterious. Usually something incomprehensible to me destroyed the relationship. That was not the case […]

"I don't want our first kiss to be some sloppy slobber job in the parking lot of the Mall," I had said the first week we were dating. "I want it to be somewhere special that's worth remembering." I had enough girlfriends in the past to know that usually, the first kiss is more underwhelming […]