Feature Columnists

How do you plan to spend the holiday of Thanksgiving? Is the planning of a large dinner and serving it to those you love, high on your list? Fellowship, mouth-watering food to tickle you pallet and getting together with loved ones is certainly a worthy goal. ...

It's been nearly two years that word first came that my first cousin, Brian, had been found dead in a Chicago hotel room. Brian, 15 years my junior, had been a substance abuser for a long time, since a catastrophic knee injury suffered in Air Force basic military training got him hooked on pain...

This is the North American beaver. It is the biggest native rodent on the continent. Rats, mice, squirrels and muskrats are its cousins. Like these other rodents, beavers are vegetarians. That means they eat plants. The North American beaver can grow to over 50 pounds. His tail is unusual. It is...

November is not generally thought of as a month to go mushroom hunting, but in Southeast Missouri there are still plenty to be found. Even during the cold winter months you may be able to brush away autumn leaves from against an old stump or log and find mushrooms growing there...

One of the most significant challenges to your Christian faith is not temptation, doing the right things in the right way at the right time, nor simply not knowing the answers to difficult questions. The greatest challenge to living out a Christina faith is fear...

In one way of reading it, the story of Zacchaeus the tax collector in Luke 19:1-10 seems to me to be a story of desire. It is a beautiful one. Here is a man living on the fringes of the society he belongs in; as a tax collector, he takes from his own people and because he is wealthy, probably takes...

Just before I started writing this column, I was outside. Ugh! It is overcast and cooling down. Rain is in the forecast. All of this weather information tells me winter is on its way. Brrrrrrr. Most gardeners are picking the last of the vegetables out of the garden before this coming freeze. They...

At first glance you might think this is a photo of cherries, but cherries don't ripen in autumn. What you see here are crabapples I photographed recently while it was raining. Why they are called crabapples is anybody's guess. Maybe the sour taste is why...

My husband and I congratulated ourselves on having all our windows washed for fall. To do this we had to raise all our window blinds, or take them down. I was stunned by what I recognized. My, that which was behind the shades was much prettier and eye-catching than our usual window coverings! I had...

The other day in my New Testament class at Southeast, we were talking about the kinds of people with whom Jesus of Nazareth associated. If you are known by the company you keep, the Galilean didn't seem to care what others thought of his choices. Yes, he hung out with the disreputable...

The other day, I had the opportunity to help build a deck for someone. I had never really built anything before and hadn't really ever used power tools, either; it wasn't until after I said I would help I realized maybe this knowledge and skill set would come in handy. But alas, I was there, and we...

The book of Joshua opens with some shocking news directly from the Lord. "Moses my servant is dead" (Joshua 1:2). The report is stunning to the reader, but for those who were living at the time, the news of Moses' demise is not new nor alarming. The people had just spent the previous 30 days...

"I could never love someone like him/her, one might say. If you only knew them, you couldn't find anything to love about them, either," and someone verbalizes the person's negative qualities. How should we look at those who, more often than not, perform undesirable actions or say mean words?...

"My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging." --"Hammering" Hank Aaron Keep swinging. Keep doing your job. Aaron, now 85, was major league baseball's all-time home run leader for 33 years...

Did you know there is more than one kind of goldenrod native to Missouri? The one you see here is a woodland goldenrod I fittingly found at the edge of the woods. The leaves at lower center are fern leaves. There are several kinds of woodland goldenrods native to North America. Some names for them...

This tiger won't eat you. In fact, it is way too little to do that. As an adult it might grow to only about 12 inches long. This animal is a native amphibian called the American tiger salamander. Tiger salamanders are seldom seen for two main reasons. They come out to hunt insects and worms at...

The late Pastor Adrian Rogers once said, "It's what you sow that multiplies, not what you keep in the barn." When we keep our time, treasures and talents hidden way, protecting them, we miss out on what can be done through them. Living a generous life is about building an abundant life by giving...

Happiness can be exhausting. Chasing after it, securing it, maintaining it -- even sometimes feeling it -- can wear me out. Our culture idolizes happiness and views it as the default state we should be existing in; it tells us if we aren't happy, something is wrong. Our culture tells us everything...

I would have normally suggested to reade it is time to seed your cool season (bluegrass, fescue, and rye) lawns when I wrote my last column four weeks ago. But because of the lack of moisture for a long time, our local soils were developing a lot of cracks in them because of that moisture deficit...

The first thing we all need to know and realize is our past does not define our future. Have you ever believed it did? It is true our past has an influence on how we look at life, what happens, our moral values and other opinions on many things. Our understanding of the past, however needn't remain...

"It's none of your beeswax." I can't speak for Southeast Missouri. I didn't grow up here. In western Pennsylvania, though, this sentence left the mouths of many of my contemporaries as a child in the 1960s. No one ever explained its origins. We all got the idea, though...

This image shows the protective webbing made by a colony of small leaf-eating worms, called fall webworms. The colony will construct a tough silk net on the end of a tree branch in late summer. These worms will not do any real damage to the tree or limbs they appear on since they only eat green...

Affirmation is powerful. To have someone who has identified the excellent qualities in your life and then comes alongside you to help call out a vision for your life is irreplaceable. Paul in 1 Timothy 4:4 does this for Timothy by affirming his giftedness and his capability for ministry. This one...

I recently was honored to be in attendance at the Gibson Recovery Center's celebration of 40 years of service to the Southeast Missouri region. While there, I learned Gibson has served more than 50,000 clients working to get sober throughout the past 40 years -- an incredibly meaningful fact, when,...

(Editor's note:The wrong photograph was published with this column last Sunday.) Shown here is the bright yellow flower of a plant called Jerusalem artichoke. Also called sunchoke, this plant is a member of the sunflower family. It has a rather spindly but woody stem that branches out and can...

Have you wished you had never suffered? That no problems had interrupted your tranquility? Or, when you've gone through your own life and death situations, within, do you hope for no more? Do you merely want to be left alone to enjoy what you choose to do?...

An email came into my inbox late last month that filled me with incredible sadness. A certain musician I'd never met had died in a car accident in northern Ohio. His name was Jared Jacobsen, the longtime organist at Chautauqua Institution in western New York state. My wife and I watched Jacobsen's...

Shown here is the bright yellow flower of a plant called Jerusalem artichoke. Also called sunchoke, this plant is a member of the sunflower family. It has a rather spindly but woody stem that branches out and can become profuse with wonderful flowers. It can grow to a height of about 8 feet...

The idea of being known as a gracious person seems to be contradictory to our culture today. We have sound bites used to build some up by tearing others down. On social media platforms, anyone from anywhere can say anything about anyone without a thought of the impact of their words. ...

In the "On Being" podcast episode "Growing Up Men," Franciscan friar Richard Rohr talks about praying for "one good humiliation a day." He began doing this years ago when he realized he was growing used to the praise he received and would become easily defensive when someone didn't agree with him....

This beautiful little insect is a webworm moth named Ailanthus Moth. It has a flower design on its outer wings. It is native to North America but is now associated with a tree brought to America from China, called The Tree of Heaven. This moth is only an inch or so long. You may possibly find the...

This has been a crazy weather year. This spring produced more rainfall than I can remember. The total amount of rainfall is debatable. I have not looked at actual weather data, but I know my windshield wipers had to be replaced. Now that it is beginning to dry up, gardeners are beginning to think...

How often have you needed help and no one came to your aid? We can all probably remember a few times, at least, when we've felt abandoned, alone and like nobody cared. You then start to think of all the other times no one gave you a hand. This scenario does happen occasionally, but often there's an...

As a teacher of New Testament in our region's largest public university, I'm acutely aware of what the text doesn't tell us about Jesus. For example, the Gospel narratives are devoid of adverbs and adjectives to describe His words. Just once it would be helpful to read, "Jesus angrily said..."...

What you see here is the face of an endangered species of water salamander called the hellbender. I photographed this one several months ago, not knowing then it would become designated as the symbol for all endangered species in Missouri. The designation came only within the past few weeks...

Conflict is inevitable. If you are going to be in a relationship with another person, you are going to disagree. Only people on sitcoms always get along, and if they do have a problem, it is resolved quickly. Life involves conflict. In Philippians 4:2-3 two women, Euodia and Syntyche, in the church...

A few years ago, I encountered an idea from Mary Rose O'Reilley's book "Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice" that changed the way I think about completing mundane tasks and being stressed by busyness. A very loose paraphrase of the idea goes like this: when you feel like you don't...

You are looking at the beautiful three-toed box turtle. This one is a young male about 14 years old. It was a little baby in 2007 when the Missouri State Legislator designated the three-toed box turtle as the state reptile. I took this photo in late August while brush hogging an old field. ...

I couldn't believe my eyes as I shopped in a popular department store recently. Walking down the aisles was uplifting to me. The colorful merchandise drew my attention and my spirits were lifted. To many, this may sound frivolous, but not to me. The fruit beaconed to me as I passed by. ...

A Missouri colossus, not in physical size but in imputed importance, strode the stage as if inspecting troops. A bishop-of-the-moment addressed the men and women about to be ordained in the United Methodist Church and fired off questions -- part of founder John Wesley's historic questions for those...

This small insect is called a mayfly, but that doesn't mean you can't find one in August. There are many different kinds of mayflies in North America. Some of them are dark brown with intricately designed wings and are a preferred fish bait for catching panfish. Trout fishermen also prize mayflies...