Staff members at a local Starbucks I frequent for hot chocolate learned that my wife and I recently celebrated our sixtieth wedding anniversary.  They are all relatively young, and sixty years seems like a long time to them.  So they asked me to write about some of the things a couple has to do in order to make it together for that long. 

In this day and age when so many married couples find they are not a match for each other and call it quits, it is not surprising that today’s younger adults find sixty years of marriage to be very unusual.  When my wife and I were married, celebrating a fiftieth anniversary was hailed as the “golden” anniversary that everyone was in awe of.  The fiftieth anniversary is still very special.  But today many marriages bypass the golden anniversary, as well as the sixtieth, and it is not unheard of for people to celebrate seventy-five years together, or even longer.  So there are many others who are more qualified than I to write about what it takes to make a marriage work.  But I will share my thoughts about making a marriage a lasting relationship. Read more…

Are people less friendly than they used to be?   

Being a clergyman, my family and I moved often.  I have never lived long enough in one town or city to compare the current attitudes of people with how individuals and families felt and acted in the past, say thirty-five or forty years ago.  It usually takes that long for basic living habits of populations to change to a noticeable degree.  I have had the “gut feeling,” though, that people today in small towns and large cities tend to be less friendly than people in past years.  I set out to find reliable information on this matter, and what I learned is very interesting.  Read more…

Would you like to get along better with your husband or wife, or with you children, especially your teenager?  Or, if you are a teenager, would you like getting along better with your parents or with a teacher in high school or college.  Or, if you are a teacher, are you making mistakes that lead students to feel put upon?  Or, at work, do you want to get along better with your boss, or do higher-ups in the company want to get along better with the people working under their supervision?  And on the list goes: let your imagination complete the list for you. 

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you need to know about a very common error in grammar that so many of us make when we are talking with others—a very simple error that is easy to correct.  I am talking about whether to use “to” or “with.” Read more…

This is a continuation of last week’s blog: “What is Gospel Music?”  

The origin and development of Gospel music goes hand in hand with the history of evangelism in the United States.  Dwight L. Moody, an evangelist of the mid-to-late 1800s, was the primary “architect” of a new kind of church music that has become what we now call Gospel Music.  Moody’s song leader and soloist, Ira D. Sankey, was the “craftsman” who composed the music that fulfilled the architect’s vision.  

The initial thrust of Colonial America’s “Great Awakening” (1730-1740s) focused on “reviving” the religious fervor of church members, and was immediately followed by the trail of itinerate evangelists who went from town to town pitching their tents and preaching “hellfire and damnation” to the unchurched.  It was then that Dwight Moody came to the fore with a new approach to evangelism that was utilized later by evangelist Billy Sunday and refined to its greatest use by Billy Graham. Read more…

Recently I was asked, “What is Gospel music?”  That would have been very easy to answer prior to the mid-1800s.  Prior to then, the term “Gospel music” was not used.  Instead, people referred to “Gospel hymns”—stately, dignified religious songs with definite references to the Gospel message of the New Testament.  One of the earliest of these Gospel hymns goes back to 1529, when Martin Luther wrote the words and composed the music of the stately and much sung A Mighty Fortress is our God.  The theme of the hymn is “relying on Jesus Christ to overcome the Devil,” with specific references to Psalm 46, Galatians 5:22, and Philippians 2:9-10.  This is not, however, the kind of music we think of today as Gospel music.

In the mid-1800s two men developed a new kind of religious music that was to become today’s Gospel music.  The two men were famed evangelist Dwight L. Moody and his music director and soloist, Ira D. Sankey, known as the “Sweet Singer.” Read more…

Here are some headlines appearing in major newspapers recently:

• “A Deeply Divided Supreme Court . . .”;
• “Divided Congress is Deeply Fractionalized . . .”;
• “The Deep Divide in Congress . . .”;
• “Obama Warns a Divided Congress . . .”;
• “The Sharp Political Divide in America . . .”;
• “The Most Divided Congress Ever . . .” 

These stories all suggest that the United States today is so divided along political lines that the politicians are unable to pass meaningful legislation and that judges (even in the Supreme Court) are unable to make unbiased legal decisions.  But does a sharply divided America necessarily mean that no meaningful legislation can emerge from our political leaders on both sides of the aisle?  I don’t think so!  Read more…