And listening to music, enjoying grapetizers with Justin…

Tests of friendship are unintentional; anything else isn’t something a real friend would ever do to a friend. Real friendships don’t demand testing, though trials, hardships, and painful experiences will, of course, reveal who the real friends are in your life. I was riding through Montana, returning from Canada with one of my best friends (i’ll offer my definition of ‘best’ in a minute)

way back in the 1900s, for all of our wildness in the liberating 60s, we were still a pretty uptight race of men and if you were a 16 year old boy and fond of another male you’d best be careful how you displayed that affection. you’d have to have been up all night at some teenage campfire singing kumbaya and watching the sun come up before you’d ever tell another guy, ” i love you, ” and

this week’s supply of doug hommert’s pictures taken at lone elk park near st. louis, mo. he caught an osprey, which aren’t usually hanging around that part of the midwest. into the sun, from a distance, doug still manages to catch a cool shot of something that maybe no one has ever seen in lone elk park…  

in 2003 i drove over 60,000 miles in four months going from chicken farm to chicken farm trying help farmers clean the water they were feeding their chickens. my happiest poultry adventures often lent occasion for me to visit a little church that just started meeting about a year before, the savannah church of christ. they didn’t have a preacher so sometimes they acted like they enjoyed me visiting as much as i

i’m writing this mostly to remind myself that i have a job to do today: pick up joey and chelsea at the airport. it’s not at all that their forgettable. as i age it doesn’t take much for some real important things to slip by me. forgetting to not pack more than a thimble full of fluids before i go through airport security is one thing; forgetting to let the dog out of the back of the car…for t

One of my favorite people in the world is Carleen. She’s been a sister and friend since we moved here to Portland and has always been a huge source of encouragement for me. Recently, in addition to all the things she’s done to serve our congregation, she’s taken on the management of our church website at https://www.portlandchurch.org/and is about to reveal a new, much needed facelift of our church

i have a regular saturday morning coffee time with a buddy of mine here in portland. we talk mostly about God…and movies…and whatever else comes up over the hour or so we spend together. he is truly one of the smartest conversationalist i’ve ever known. a big guy with a big heart, as a child he was ‘labeled’ slow and it wasn’t until much later in life that he learned he was dyslexi

we’re having a nice fall here in oregon. summer and drought has burned on long enough to almost make portlandia long for the rain to come. not me, i love summer, the warmth…sunshine. it could be summer all the time here far as i’m concerned but then, i guess that would make it california. so even if the signs of autumn are hints that the warmth is going to go away soon, the changing colors on the tr

sooner or later i’ve got to get around to writing some preacherly things, but for now, as i’m trying to learn, cave man style, how to work this WP thingy, i’ll just write em as they come up… and here’s the Mango bike; a bike bought by me and built out by my buddy ray roske in denver. this bike started life as a 1969 moto guzzi ambassador v750 police bike. by the time a kid in moses lake