Spirit Matters
Judgement Overruled
Judgment Overruled There’s a way to balance those opinions By Norris Burkes August 2023 In the short time since I returned to pastoring, I hear again the same old complaints against organized religion. Sometimes my responses to these critics are served...
True Cost Of War
The true cost of war is something I learned about while serving as chaplain on death notification teams. We delivered news no one wants to hear.
Movies often depict these teams visiting a three-bedroom house where Mom is making dinner and Dad is helping a younger sibling with homework.
Television dramas cast the teams in a four-man role as they approach the door in dress uniforms, knock, deliver the brief announcement and retreat to a government sedan.
Wing And A Prayer
Wing And A Prayer Should we force religion on a captive audience? By Norris Burkes June 2023 As the airplane door shut on my flight home from Honduras, a woman stood and spoke to us in Spanish. I didn’t understand her words, but my “Chappy sense”...
Out Of Order
Have you ever been tempted to respond to unwanted advice with the line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn?”
I’m sure you have. It’s a common response when we are victims of hit-and-run advice. It’s a way of telling opinionated busybodies they haven’t earned the right to be relevant in our lives.
I was on the damning end of such a response one afternoon some years back as I began my first job in hospital chaplaincy.
Quiz Master
Perhaps you remember the Veg-O-Matic commercial from the mid-1960s, where marketing guru and inventor Ron Popeil promoted a kitchen appliance by saying, “It slices, it dices and so much more!”
Veg-O-Matic ads inspired a “Saturday Night Live” spoof about a fish blender called the Super Bass-O-Matic, first performed by Dan Aykroyd in 1976.
Nearly 50 years later, let me introduce you to the Belief-O-Matic. Like the Veg-O-Matic, once you use it, you'll wonder how you ever did without it.
I’m not kidding. The Belief-O-Matic is real.
On Deaf Ears
Tahoe Park resident Lynn Bishop joined dozens of other dog lovers last year answering a call from the city’s Front Street Animal Shelter. Foster a dog for the holidays.
Approximately 60 cars lined up for drive-through fostering. “It was like an assembly line,” says Bishop, who took home Roscoe, a 6-year-old unneutered chihuahua mix brought to the shelter as a stray.
On any given day, as many as 345 dogs are fostered through Front Street. Many are not spayed or neutered.
