‘A River Runs Through It’

It is no small thing when we know someone, someone we love deeply, who is in trouble, or facing a crisis, or is lost in their direction in life and we want to help them, but our offer of help is ignored or rejected. Even the One we call Savior could not save them all.

Showing up for God

“My intercessor is my friend as my eyes pour out tears to God.” (Job 16:20) Iwas reading in Acts 4:31 about the early church and how they prayed together and the “place in which they were gathered together was shaken.

Looking back...

100 YEARS AGO Miss Willie Dymke leaves this week for Laredo where she will teach Latin and English in the high school for the fourth consecutive year. Miss Dymke has been employed this summer in the State Department of Education at Austin.

Moving burden away from taxpayers

E ach year, as we put together the Milam County budget, we face the same basic question: How do we continue providing the services our citizens expect while remembering where a signifi cant portion of the money to pay for those services comes from?

Being stalked in Rockdale is strange

You know what’s kind of funny to me? I lived in a city of four million people for 30 years and not once in all that time did I have a stalker. I didn’t get a stalker until I moved back to Rockdale, and it has happened in just the past few weeks.

Affordability

Over the past few years, costs of living have increased significantly faster than wages, thus creating a major affordability problem for millions of Americans. It is a hot-button campaign topic at present, but the real issue is much more visceral. It is multifaceted, and solutions won’t be simple.

Discipleship

On Tuesday I read Matthew 8:1-17. It starts out saying, “Large crowds followed Jesus as He came down the mountainside.” When was the last time you saw a large crowd at your church? I ask because the church represents Jesus, right?

God incognito

C. S. Lewis, in one of his letters to a man named Malcolm, offered this observation: “…the world is crowded with God. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend.” Once there was a man whose life was one of misery.

$40 trillion

Another crushing milestone for the federal debt; neither party can stop borrowing The federal debt marked a milestone last week, surpassing $40 trillion for the first time. That number is so large it’s hard to conceive. Forty trillion miles reaches beyond every planet in our solar system.

Spencer: It’s like losing another sibling

FALLING FAR FROM THE TREE Ifound out Spencer Stephens died on Sunday. Denise Starnes found out before mom did, so she came to the house to tell her, and they both went out to Rockdale Estates and Rehabilitation.