Free Grace Conversations

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 […]

After the movie, apparently, neither of us was quite ready to say, "good night." The car didn't seem to want to shift into drive as long as the destination was an ending to all that was good in my world. Being a creative duo, it didn't take long for one of us to offer up […]

The first day of shooting on our movie, which we clumsily called Cookie, just so happened to coincide with the first day of Kristah's internship. The free labor arrived at a perfect time, considering that I needed a film crew. No doubt, it's not what she had expected to be doing for the first day […]

"I want to admit something, but you can't laugh," I typed. I hadn't seen Kristah since that day in class, but I had a regular line of communication open through facebook messenger. I was careful not to be too friendly, always remembering that she was an eighteen-year-old college kid, and I was in the mid-twenties. […]

It took me two weeks to get up the nerve to send Kristah a message online. I had found her on Facebook the same day but didn't want to seem too eager. It was difficult to wait that long, but it was the obligatory interval for avoiding the appearance of being a creepy stalker.  We […]