We lingered too long along the clifftop overlooks. We had not seen each other in months, so our trail lunch turned into a reunion filled with stories of our new babies. It was a cold November day in the Smokies, and Tom had packed a small camp stove. We ended lunch with decadent hot chocolate […]

 On Tuesday, are you heading downtown for the fireworks? Nashville will use 200 miles of wire, 16 tractor trailer beds, and 4 barges in order to shoot 40,000 pounds of fireworks into the sky as the Nashville Symphony plays patriotic flare. Maybe you plan to get to the main stage early and do a little […]

The May rains were not enough and the dry spell lingered all summer, cows drank down ponds, crops failed, dust coated everything. Around 3:30am, Uncle Clellon would whisper, “Honey, get up.” We skipped coffee. I slid into the truck’s passenger seat and closed my eyes as we rode to ‘the other place’, then down into […]

Hi I am Paul Purdue, Mary Jane, Lee and Colby’s cousin, and the Pastor at Belmont UMC in Nashville Tennessee, where we believe everyone is beloved by God and that clergy generally wear robes for funerals. But I speak to you today as a family member, so I wore a suit, but I thought I […]

Do you ever think about how the Bible opens? “When God began to create…” Did you sense  the liturgical pattern: the text calling, responding, repeating the chorus like a hymn? Imagine a cantor’s melodic chanting resonating through the walls of an ancient synagogue as a new Torah cycle began with God beginning to create!  God […]

The ancient craft of letter or scroll reproduction was done entirely by hand, from the choices of the leather artisan to the scribe’s font sizing choices; these little human differences could mean that at the end of a letter there might be space for another verse. A scribe might add a postscript like Colossians 4 […]

I love Pentecost Sunday, maybe for the clamor and chaos of it- loud sounds, the crowd full of questions, bewildered and surprised by the Holy Spirit.   During college some of my curious Christian friends started visiting different churches around town. They visited a small holiness church on the edge of town. Long before Billboard began […]

Ships, seas, trade winds and travel stir human imagination. In the verses before our passage Bishop Peter has been traveling around the Jerusalem Annual Conference and finds himself at the home of Simon the Tanner in the busy port of Joppa. I like to imagine Simon made the finest quality leather for the scrolls Luke […]

Two years ago, my cousin Tom and I bought a tractor for the farm that has been in our family for over 100 years. Our tractor arrived within a week, but due to pandemic delays our bush hog was on backorder. When Boo from Big Three Tractor finally called, our hayfields had not been mowed […]

Four inches of snow covered the roads, and it was still falling. Dad found me and said, “Your mother wants some things from the grocery; let’s go.” I smiled as it was easy to persuade Dad to buy Cheetos, Captain Crunch, Cokes, and other treats on Mom’s ‘no-buy’ list. Walking to the car, Dad tossed […]