Feature Columnists

When I was 12, I was trapped, and it was my fault. I was riding a three-wheeler ATV with some friends down a gravel road. The combination of inexperience, loose gravel and exhilaration caused the ATV to flip and land on top of me. The frame pinned my helmeted head to the ground while the hot engine...

Recently, I watched the Netflix show "Outer Banks." While I wouldn't recommend it for people under 25 years of age (sorry, I think it's a show that was written in a purposefully highly-addictive manner and glamorizes much bad decision-making; viewers are in need of full prefrontal cortex...

This is a small songbird native to the eastern third of the United States and a portion of southeastern Canada. This very precious bird is the wood thrush. It looks very similar to two other native songbirds, the hermit thrush and the oven bird. The hermit thrush has dark speckles only on the...

Driving through the country is always exciting. The quiet surroundings minus the hub-bub of town and city activity are awesome. This year, particularly, brings a vivid beauty of greenery. Trees are filled with leaves waving in the winds, and tall slim stalks of grass gingerly bending and bowing to...

The weather was warm for Dec. 29 in Israel, or so our tour guide informed us. On the day in question in 2009, we stood facing the Mediterranean Sea, as clear a body of water as I've ever seen. It was here, in Caesarea, that Pontius Pilate had his headquarters while governor of the Roman province of...

The face you are looking at belongs to a male red ear slider. The red ear slider is a water turtle native to North America. It is probably the most prevalent water turtle in Southeast Missouri. It can be found almost anywhere there is water -- rivers, streams, lakes, swamps and farm ponds...

My friend Emily recently reminded me that we are free. Jesus purchased us with the price of his life so we could walk in freedom and joy and love with him. He wants to be in relationship with us, to see what we will choose, to decide and live together. We don't have to complicate things. He wants...

None of the men in my life has had such a profound impact on me as my father. The Bible teaches what modern psychology has affirmed: Fathers, and those men who step into the lives of young people as father figures, matter. (Sean Rossman, "Why Dads Matter, according to science," USA Today, June 13,...

I took this photo June 11. It shows the seed pods of a cottonwood tree bursting with what looks like cotton. In the mass of fluff are tiny seeds that are dispersed by the wind. Cottonwood trees naturally grow in wet areas along riverbanks, lakes and ponds. This tree can grow to 100 feet tall. Its...

June is a good month to look for fireflies. The best time to see them is after the sun goes down. The male firefly will be flying around flashing his light from time to time. The female will usually be sitting on the ground, in the grass or on a weed. She waits for a male to fly close by and flash...

What do you see when you look in the mirror? Do you like what stares back at you or are you disappointed by it? Those are questions we can all ponder. As a child, I remember a favorite declaration of my mother. Mom, as I've stated in former writings, was a simple farm lady who was the very essence...

When June arrives, some folks work their way through a summer reading list. The list may be comprised of books, whether ones with physical spines or accessed via the Internet, that folks choose to peruse on vacation. The thought of a summer reading list got me thinking about books that have been...

What we love, who we love, and how we love them are a direct response to the love of God in our lives. In 1 Peter 1:22, we read, "You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters." There are some principles in this...

This week, I've been given the gift of being at the ocean. As I stare at the waves and listen to them come in and go out, come in and go out, come in and go out, lines from spoken word poet Sarah Kay's poem "B (If I Should Have a Daughter)" keep coming to mind...

Shown here is a beautiful white flowering native North American wildflower called "foxglove beardtongue." It is also called "digitalis," a Latin word meaning glove-like. The unopened flower buds are said to resemble individual fingers of a glove. This flower has been widely used as a beautification...

If you do an internet search, you will find a number of speculative articles about what a U.S. church may look like post-COVID-19. It may be a fool's errand to guess what worship will look like once the pandemic runs its course, but I can't help myself. My thinking, admittedly, is a bit dystopian....

I took this photo at the edge of a wood lot on May 24. The mayapple plant is one of the earliest native woodland wildflowers to appear in springtime. It grows quickly to a height of from about a foot to maybe 20 inches tall. A mayapple with only a single umbrella-like leaf will not bloom or produce...

I dropped a neutral washed-out background into this photo to accentuate the beautiful colors and intricate details of this flower. At lower right is a spent flower on the same stem. It is already going to seed. This is a native wild iris known as the Missouri blue flag. It is also called the...

Do you remember the song "I will survive?" As soon as you hear pianist cascading their fingers across the keyboard, followed by the driving bass line and the drums, you cannot help but move to the sound. (I'm a Baptist, we don't dance. We move. It's different). Then the lyrics "As long as I know...

Sometimes it can be difficult to know how much of guiding my life is up to me and how much is up to God. How does my own free will and effort factor into receiving God's grace and allowing God to guide my life? We are shaping this together; who does what?...

Drawing conclusions from data should be done carefully. Folks say raw numbers don’t lie and I’d give my qualified agreement to that statement. What we do with statistics, though, can lead us to errors in thinking. ...

"I just don't feel like I've gotten anything accomplished today," we sigh and say. People particularly feel this during the pandemic we are, now experiencing. We beat ourselves up and ask why. We think we're accomplishing nothing? We feel sad and unfulfilled...

This photo is from May 6. The white flowering plants are wild blackberries. What you see here is a blackberry patch. This one is relatively small. It covers an area about 20 feet wide by 35 feet long. It is sandwiched between a grassy area and new-growth timber...

Today is Mother's Day. Regardless of the request for physical distancing, today is a day to honor your mother. Women sharing the image of God played an absolutely vital role in the Bible. They are celebrated. Honored. Cunning. Entrepreneurial. Yes, there are instances where women were abused and...

A pair of Carolina wrens have built a nest in the same place in my tractor for the past five years. Each spring they raise a brood of baby wrens. When I need to use the tractor, I check to see if the nest is there. Before I start the tractor I remove the nest and set it aside close by...

Recently, my parents were putting the screens in windows for summertime. A key piece that holds things together fell out into the flower bed below. I heard them struggling to find it and thought maybe I could lend some assistance, so I decided to go help them look. It was a little metal piece in a...

While filling the pulpit for a few months in a Cape Girardeau church as a pastoral retiree a few years back, I was invited to join an intrepid group of folks who came together occasionally to talk about interfaith understanding. One of my better evenings as a clergyman occurred at Christ Episcopal...

Have you ever shook a tree to allow the delicious goodies to fall on the ground? Maybe the fruit was still somewhat green and stuck to the branches more tenaciously. We had to be patient and wait, even though we felt we must hurry. We climbed the tree and we shook even harder. ...

This butterfly is called a zebra swallowtail. It has markings reminiscent of a zebra. In Southeast Missouri the zebra swallowtail is less common than many other kinds of butterflies such as the tiger swallowtail or pipe-vine butterfly. The tail at the end of each of its wings is about an inch...

Springtime is flower time, and there are many different kinds and colors. I took this photo March 31. The complementary colors caught my attention. The purple flowers are American violets. The yellow flowers are native dandelions. These two can be found blooming together in your yard, especially if...

The New Testament letter of 1 Peter is a letter of hope. Hope to people who are enduring hardships, difficulties and trials. Peter has written to people who because of their faith are being ostracized from their friends and business acquaintances. The people are being pressured to abandon their...

I like forward motion. It feels nice to know I am progressing toward something desirable, that my time is not being wasted but that I am actively creating change in a way that moves my life in the direction I am hoping to go. Maybe it's because I am the product of a generation who has had the world...

As I watched a television show, recently, a plea from a little girl tugged at my heartstrings. She was losing a teacher she dearly loved. The student was overwrought at her teacher's upcoming departure, and she couldn't understand why her mentor, ever, had to leave. ...

Clad in a cloth robe, body irrevocably thinned by stage four oral cancer, the man shuffled to the bathroom behind his walker. Steadying him on the short journey was his wife of 56 years. Self-reliant and independent, he didn't want the help. Truth be told, the man was a bit brusque in his final...

If I had to choose two small trees to line a driveway or beautify a park, I would choose the native white flowering dogwood and the native redbud. These trees are both fringe trees in the wild. They don't grow more than about 30 feet tall and are usually found at the edge of the woods. Neither tree...

March 29 found me photographing catkins of a cottonwood tree. A magnificent clear blue sky made a perfect backdrop to highlight the yellow-green female catkins along the far reaches of a limb. Spaced at short intervals along the outer limbs of the tree, these female catkins grow to about 5 inches...

It seems strange, writing about Easter when it doesn't feel like it. We haven't been able to meet together physically as the Body of Christ for a few weeks now, and even though we are united in spirit by the Spirit, our triumphant day as Christians feels a bit mournful, too. We don't get to meet...

The Bible tells us in the gospels several details on how resurrection Sunday went. The women went to the tomb at dawn, finding it empty. Two of the disciples had run to the tomb and found it empty just as the women said (Jn 20:4). Meanwhile, the chief priests and Pharisees, who rallied to have...