Monthly Letters

Dear CCW family, Several years ago, I watched two angry yard workers in my front lawn screaming at each other. One man got into such a rage that he threw his machete directly at his adversary. He missed, but it came way too close. Then, just as the assailant jumped in his truck to escape, the second man slammed a baseball bat against his truck’s windshield, shattering it. The driver burned rubber as he took off. The man with the…

We have the privilege of keeping Pam’s mother in our home. She is 95 years old and adds a new and sometimes spirited difference behind our walls.  Doris Knight has always been a bright person, especially when it comes to numbers. As an illustration, many of her last years she has worked a difficult Sudoku puzzle every day. I have yet to do one!  Doris went to Ouachita Baptist College (now University) in Arkansas when she was just 16. She…

Since I wrote you last, we’ve made a big decision as a ministry. We’ve decided that we will give our books and other materials away gratis. Below is an explanation we have posted online. I hope you will not only read it, but will also order those items you wish to read and to use strategically for the expanse and maturing of Christ’s kingdom. In this way, we share in your lives and ministry to others, and you in ours. Together…

My oldest son, Benjamin, and I just finished simultaneously reading the classic, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. We read individually, slowly, in spare moments, and sometimes in strange places, but with sustained interest. It was R. C. Sproul’s favorite book (see here). Behind his desk was an oil painting of Moby Dick, the indomitable white whale, himself.   I often read single paragraphs in the book containing several words I did not know, but were inviting to learn. Among them were numerous terms…

I queried an older man who has become a dear friend with a pointedly stark question: what is your purpose in life? He is advanced in years. He ought to know by now. The question struck home, and he teared up trying to answer it.  He failed. He had nothing much to say. And he felt the pain of the emptiness that lingered in the air as he tried. He seemed not to like what fumbled out and admitted he…

I could walk to the museum when I was a boy in Kansas City. Of all the wonders I saw there, the shrunken head was the most alluring. I could envision how it was made to shrink to the size of a hand. It was inset in the wall, darkened, menacing, exotic, jaw-dropping, and . . . fake. It was years later that scientists discovered that 80% of the shrunken heads displayed around the country were not human heads, but…

Dear CCW family, Let me remind you of an experience I had before COVID-19, when you could sit very closely together . . . Christmas Tradition: Singing Carols to the One They Don’t Love “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you.” Jn 15:18 “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds . . .” Col 1:21-22 “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and…

I stood before Michelangelo’s David in Florence, Italy. No one questioned that an artist had sculpted this magnificent piece of Renaissance art. It was the work of a genius. Yet, in the same room, no doubt, there were persons called “atheists” who would deny that a greater Artist was also necessary to create the original David that Michelangelo attempted to imitate.  The true David, like other creations of God, was far more difficult to make than what Michelangelo crafted out of stone.…