Free Grace Conversations

As my love for the Bible was beginning to blossom, my friendship with Michael was soon tested by fire. By eighth grade, Michael was reading the Wheel of Time. It's a huge series of fantasy novels, and each is as fat as a Webster's dictionary. Michael's face was buried in a book most of the […]

My fourth-grade class was buzzing with Christmas-time enthusiasm. The whir of exuberant voices filled the room as a holiday coloring sheet went around. The Christmas break was coming, with its presents and candy. The page slid into place as I reached under my desk for my crayons. Some kids had the 48 color set, but […]

As we grew into devious little miscreants, we could feel the blisters brought by the struggle against our behavioral constraints. With each wriggle, they grew tighter. There were rules at home, rules at school, and rules on the playground. There were even rules for That hatchet was the second installment of our freedom plan. We […]

As we grew into devious little miscreants, we could feel the blisters brought by the struggle against our behavioral constraints. With each wriggle, they grew tighter. There were rules at home, rules at school, and rules on the playground. There were even rules for proper bathroom etiquette. Didn't they know I was a descendant of […]

Before city council decided to build the bypass, a multi-mile loop around my hometown, much of the outskirts were still blanketed by the pine forest of East Texas. The little Bible church we attended was a metal building at the end of a dead-end road, surrounded by tall pines. The church attracted an enlightened lot, […]

Grandma and Grandpa lived in Dallas. Our trips there often came in winter since the most active concentration of holidays accompany the cold weather. We would draw shapes in the fog our breath made on the van windows as we drove.  Being a kid who lived hours from my grandparents meant I was probably more […]

Not many days after the bunk bed incident, I was standing by my Dad's drawing table. The walls of his studio were always crowded with drying paintings. That's where he would work when he had freelance illustration jobs.  At that time, he was building upon a budding career as a painter for hire. From children's […]

 A father's nightly rituals are a thing of boundless fascination to his son. His endless hours at work might as well have been spent in a mysterious patch of the Brazilian Amazon as in an office building two miles from the house. My brothers and I would anticipate the nightly ambush we planned to lay […]

If your parents didn't take you to an amusement park as a kid, they either didn't love you or…. No, that's pretty much it, they didn't love you. The park of choice for those near Dallas is the famed Six Flags over Texas. It's a theme park with towering roller coasters, fair-style games, a steam […]