Hear me tell this old chestnut of a story by clicking here: Of Trees and Truthfulness

This story is an old chestnut I have been telling for years. It is a rare story. A man only gets a few stories like this to tell in his lifetime. I first wrote it about twelve years ago. (2-18-2012)
It had been years since I had seen my grandfather’s old farm. It was sold about fifteen years ago. When we moved into the area and I wanted my wife and children to see the …

I’ve always considered a trip to the barber kind of a luxury, a social event. A barber shop is one of the places that hasn’t changed much over the last fifty years (except for a brief “styling salon” period in the seventies which went the way of the disco, thank God.)
I just love a good, old-fashioned barber shop. The smells. The local gossip. The latest news. A few new jokes. A fishing report.
A few years ago in a distant city I purred in town in my little brown wagon to …

Classic re-post from 2009
Heidi wanted the family to sing at her wedding. I modified this song for her and we sang it as she and Austin stood together at the altar just before they exchanged their vows.
Download: Heidi and Austin
In September of 1979 Lois and I drove away to begin our lives together. That was thirty years, eight children and two grandsons ago. Driving this same road earlier this month I was thinking about Austin and Heidi. In a few weeks they would drive away together. I wrote …

Classic re-post from 2002
“You need to get more exercise,” they said. But when you weigh as much as I did that’s not as easy as it sounds. And on a perfectly innocent-looking day a few years ago it landed me in trouble.
I had talked my then thirteen year old son Kyle into a bike ride with me. We were biking the Kokosing Gap Trail in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. It was a beautiful path along a river built on an old railroad right of way. Most of …

A classic from 2003
When we moved to Flint to assume the direction of the ministry here at the Character Inn we discarded or gave away many, many things. We now live in an apartment on the sixth floor in six rooms. We have a storage room in the basement. In preparation for our move we hauled away six truckloads of things at one point and gave many things to Goodwill or just threw them away.
There was one thing I could never throw away because it was too …

Have you noticed that there are times it is really hard to act like a Chrisitan? When you have a personal conflict with another Christian it’s hard to act like a Christian. When you have a personal conflict involving sports, it’s really a lot harder. When you have a personal conflict with another Christian involving sports and your children, then it is really, really tempting to set aside your Christian profession and just throw down the gloves and go at it.
Linda had a conflict with another Christian, named Paula. …

The most important lessons you learn will be outside the formal leaning structure. My second fall in college I toured the west with a singing group. Our classroom for three months and hundreds of miles was a bus. We had no privacy. We had to be with the same people for hours at a time. In a setting like that irritations inevitably surface.
One young man in the group rubbed me the wrong way right from the beginning. His name was Jerry. Usually I find it easy to like people but …

I have to admit to some quaint ideas. I still feel an inner warmth and get a little misty-eyed when I see a picture of a family walking to church on a spring morning. In these warm fantasies the sun is always shining, birds sing, and the walk is lined with daffodils. The trees are in the tender bud of spring and church bells ring in the distance.
Dad is wearing a suit. Mom is in a beautiful Easter dress, her hair “just so”. The boys …

Purring through the dark on a long trip one night my Dad got to talking. He told me a shocking story about our family. During the depression chickens were mysteriously disappearing from the family farm just north of Chatham, Ohio. Times were hard. Money and food were scarce.
After a number of chickens disappeared they began to realize it was not animals but humans who were spiriting the chickens away in the night.
They formed a plan. The boys took turns out on the back porch each night waiting, shot-gun in …

My Grandfather named things. He named his cows. He named his tractors. He even gave my Grandmother a nickname. She had a perfectly good name when he met her. It was a beautiful, appropriate, honorable name that fit her perfectly. Her name is Grace but grandpa always called her Tiny.
My Dad acquired the habit of naming things from him. His names have never been literary masterpieces. They are more playful and descriptive. Examples include names like “Tricky Little Copper” and “the Cardboard Bank.”
I’ve named a few things myself. (Ask me …