I typically listen to audiobooks on my way to and from work. This morning was no different, but I finished a chapter each for both my current "Improvement Reading" and "Entertainment Reading" books with plenty of time left in my commute. So I put my extremely…
I was running late to somewhere I didn't want to go in the first place. The men of the church were having a campout party. I had heard about it plenty of times in the weeks prior but had never planned to go. I was so early in my twenties…
The 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently passed. On that incredible day, Neil Armstrong said the famous line, "That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."…
When I was a teenager, I went through a phase in which I had taken it upon myself to debunk "Christian Mythology." I still find that term helpful when referring to common beliefs that don't have a biblical backing, but my usage of it at the time was wholly derogatory.…
The world was small when I was five. It consisted entirely of my family's house, our road (and its immediate surroundings), our church, and my school. I knew many other places existed, but they may as well have been on the moon for all of my ability to get there.…
One of my previous jobs was in the internal call center for a national organization. The upper management treated us like peons but gave us more power to cause problems than I've ever wielded before or since. We could remotely access pretty much anything connected to the Internet at any…
During my early days at the University of Tennessee, I considered majoring in English with an emphasis on creative writing. I was not planning to teach English, so that would have basically meant seriously overpaying for writing classes. Nonetheless, I found myself in a class called Writing Fiction. (Saying that…
My mind is good at making connections. That comes in handy when assembling a story or trying to hunt down the cause of a bug in software, but it becomes a major hurdle when confronted with something that carries a lot of emotional baggage. The month of May is hard…
When we were younger, my sisters and I went to a summer camp in Vero Beach a couple years in a row. Kids under 8 could only participate in the day camp, so I was looking forward to going to the "big kid" overnight camp the year I…
In my late teens, I worked as a phone rep in the call center for a Christian television company. The Israelites had ten commandments, but we had two: Thou shalt not shake the snack machine. Thou shalt not grant a refund (or even imply that one might be possible) to…