From my heart...

This is a story I've told at concerts many times, but it's worth sharing through this blog as well. Horatio Gates Spafford was a prominent lawyer in Chicago in the years during and after the Civil War.  He was also well known as a supporter and friend of Christian Evangelist D.L. Moody.   Horatio and his wife, Anna were living the American dream:  wealth and prosperity, part of a growing city,  and a growing family.  Before long they had a son and four young daughters.   However, it wasn't long before things went bad, and then went from bad to worse. Horatio Gates Spafford In 1870, Horatio and Anna's only son died of pneumonia at the age of four.  As a dad of three kids, I cannot even wrap my mind around the grief that must have been theirs.  The next spring, they invested much of their wealth in real estate on the north side of the growing city of Chicago.  Just a few months later, in October, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed al...

Since I first started working on my family tree, I'd always known that my great grandfather Thomas Whittaker had a nephew who was killed in World War II.  Harry Sylvester Wilson was born August 27, 1924 in Niles, the son of Earl an Ida Whittaker Wilson.  He was the second of five sons and a daughter born into the family. In February of 1943, Harry joined the Army as part of E Company, 114th Infantry Regiment.  The 114th was a part of the 44th Infantry Division.  After training in Louisiana and Kansas, the unit was shipped to Massachusetts before they went overseas and entered France in the summer of 1944.  They saw combat for the first time in October of that year.  They fought in numerous engagements and on November 17, 1944 liberated the town of Avricourt, France.  It was on that date, according to military records, that Pvt. Wilson was killed in action.  He was just twenty years old. E Company, 114th Infantry Regiment before deploying ove...

Country music superstar and Wheeling, WV native Brad Paisley has a song that is one of my absolute favorites.  It's called Letter to Me , and it's the words he wishes he could speak to his seventeen-year-old self.   For those of you not familiar with the song, here are the lyrics, or you can click here for the video. If I could write a letter to me and send it back in time to myself at seventeen, First I'd prove it's me by saying, look under your bed, there's a Skoal can and a Playboy no one else would know you hid. And then I'd say, I know it's tough when you break up after seven months. And yeah I know you really liked her and it just don't seem fair, but all I can say is pain like that is fast, and it's rare. And oh, you got so much going for you, going right.  But I know at seventeen it's hard to see past Friday night.  But you'll make it through this and you'll see, you're still around to write this letter to me. At the...

In light of the tragedy in Oklahoma City this week, I thought I'd pass along some notes from a message I shared a while back on dealing with tragedy in life.  It's a long read, but I hope you'll find it helpful. Independence Day.  Dante's Peak.  Armageddon.  2012. All of these movies have something in common.   They are all about disasters that seem to come from nowhere.   They all made a lot of money because people connect with the theme of a tragic situation that is so much bigger than all of us.  It's not just Hollywood.   World War II cost the lives of over 50 million people.  A tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands.  Earthquakes that take decades to recover from.  And now, a tornado in Oklahoma.  These things can seem so much bigger than us, so out of our hands. Going back to Jesus' time we find a prophecy of future tragedy... In Matthew 24 it says, "Jesus left the templ...

As a lifelong lover of history, particularly military history, I am always looking for a new book, documentary, film that can teach me something I didn't know before about the history of our world.   Currently I'm watching a series called "The Color of War."  It uses color archival footage to tell the history of different aspects of World War 2.  Before I get into what I want to talk about, here are some facts that blew me away about the war, which lasted from 1939-1945.   (you can read some of these facts here ) - Over 55 million men, women, and children lost their lives as a direct result of the war.   Of that number, over one third (21 million) were Russians.  80 percent of Soviet men born in 1923 were dead by 1945.   More Russians died at the Battle of Stalingrad alone, than the number of British and Americans who died in the entire war. A German plane over the ruins of Stalingrad - That statsitic leads into (but certain...

"There's a first time for everything..." It's one of those overused phrases that is nevertheless true.   Tonight is the first soccer game of the season for my daughter Rachel and son Caleb.  For Rachel, it's her third season.  For Caleb, his first.  Caleb is the kind of kid who is never willing to admit when he's worried, scared, hurt, or angry (though sometimes whether he admits it or not it's pretty easy to tell).  I won't even bother asking him about his feelings about the game tonight because he'll claim he doesn't have any...but I remember one of my "firsts." The first time I preached a sermon was back in 1998 in Owensville, IN.  I was being critiqued on the sermon because at the time I was taking a course on sermon preparation.   I don't get nervous speaking in front of people, never have.   That day I must have just lost track of time or prepared too much, I don't know...but my sermon dragged on for 45 minutes.  The...

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”   Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.   Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that...”   - James 4:13-15 If you know me at all, you know that one of my great passions is genealogy.  I am fascinated to the point of obsession with discovering more about my family history.  Among my ancestors, there are few with as compelling a story as that of my 9th great grandfather (that means great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great) Thomas Blossom. Memorial to Pilgrims buried in Leiden, Holland Thomas Blossom was born in 1580 in the little town of Wisbech, England (about 100 miles north of London).    He attended the University of Cambridge (where at some point he...

Psalm 139:13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb. (NLT)  For mother's day I wanted to go back a few decades. It's the early part of 1977.  Jimmy Carter has just been sworn in as President.  Unemployment is high, inflation is high, and the mood in the country is low.   That previous summer the first Apple personal computer had gone on on sale, and in the summer to come, the Son of Sam will terrorize New York City. In the small town of Mineral Ridge, OH, thirty-somethings Ken and Connie Mowery live with their family of five children...a daughter aged 16, and sons aged 13, 10, 8, and 6.   A family of seven, not unlike many families in small town America.  Except their daughter is pregnant. Imagine being barely sixteen and pregnant.  There is no father in the picture.  Your parents have a house full of young children already.  Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal a...