Memoirous

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back dedicated to Keith Wasserman and Lynda Moody, two old college friends Is still going forward; I’m still moving. So there is bare ground starting to show outside. The temps have warmed up, a bit. I rode my bike 3x in one week. I ran twice. This is progress. The sun comes up earlier and sets later—after 6 these days. *Yet, last week I locked my keys in the car (one step back) but Chad from Okemos Marathon came in a jiffy and got things straight (one step forward). *I was cleaning my water reservoir and got too vigorous and broke a piece. No biggy—until a few days later I discovered a lake flooding my countertop. (One step back!) Yesterday I ordered a slim 27-cup Brita from Walmart and the online option said delivery was same-day and free. Altogether, it was much less than I thought it would be to replace. I went out and met the drivers in my driveway, a couple out on a nice day in their KIA making stops. I asked is this a side gig and they said, yeah. G...

The more things change, the more they stay the same: Happy MLK Day This is more musing than scholarly: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sixty years ago, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, was a surge of public engagement in the most basic rights for fellow human beings, Americans pushed to the margins. In the south particularly but everywhere, Black Americans were living under segregation. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged this and challenged the status quo—not without reprisal or the fear of death. He and his adherents, believers, did the right thing in standing up. As must we. But, he knew talk was cheap. In a talk delivered at Stanford in 1967 he credited advances that had been made (mostly under his leadership), but he said it wasn’t enough. He addressed the problem of Two Americas. One is living in sunny oblivion, unaware that a second America exists. It isn’t just about black or white, Black or White, but many Americans live in inequality, wi...

Good Works by Keith Wasserman and Christine D. Pohl Eerdmans Publishing, 2021 This book has been out for 9 months now and I apologize it has taken so long. It was a labor of love. You see, I have been friends with the author Keith Wasserman for nearly 50 years. There is so much in that sentence above that I love: using the words Keith Wasserman in tandem with author. When I first met Keith as a fifteen-year old sophomore at Centerville High School he was more the author of chaos. No one would have ever dreamed he’d write something let alone his own name. He was sort of an eesh guy. But, then   . . . . We got saved. He changed, my attitude changed. We belonged to the same church. Keith baptized me in a dammed up gully behind his house, Me and my friends sent him cassette tapes when he went off to England to assist an evangelize one summer. He’s helped me through MANY crisis of faith and personal struggles. And never once have we stopped being friends. But this is a...

In the summer of ’76 some friends of mine answered the call of God and went to England to accompany a traveling evangelist. The boys had just graduated from high school and were from my youth group at church. They would be gone for the whole summer. One night me and Barb went over to Rhonda Owens house out in the country for a sleep-over. Rhonda said let’s make a tape for Keith and Mike and send it to England for them to listen to. We set up a tape recorder out in the backyard and lay down under the stars and just gabbed. If I recall it was a lot of nonsense. What I also remember is the brilliance of that night sky. Crystal clear. The whole universe pinwheeling above our heads. A smudge of Milky Wave. A plethora of falling stars streaking across the sky, more than I could count. Comets trailing tails of colored gases. It was as if the heavens were giving us a show. Every other exclamation on the tape was: There’s another one! And another one! I wish with all my heart to hear that...