Montgomery’s Truck Stop (1587 North Glenstone Avenue) sat at the northwest corner of Division Street and Glenstone Avenue in Springfield, Missouri. A poorly maintained asphalt parking lot surrounded the light-colored brick building. Some friends and I visited this dingy hole-in-the-wall weekly for a while in college and spent hours “doing homework” and solving the problems […]
My grandfather died 2 months before my 13th birthday. Other family members died previously, but my grandpa’s death was the first big death I was old enough to remember in any kind of significant way. I had the wind knocked out of me in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It started Labor Day weekend. […]
My grandma always displayed a nativity at Christmas time. She used a simple nativity with painted clay statues when I was growing up. I loved to play with this nativity, especially the tiny sheep and baby Jesus because they were the smallest pieces of the nativity and I thought they were the cutest ones too. […]
In the fall of 2009, I was in the middle of a divorce. My 4.5-year marriage had been failing for longer than it had worked. It became apparent to me that this relationship wasn’t what I needed. A friend of mine owned a small rental house that was empty. She lent me the key so […]
A gratitude practice became a part of my life a handful of years ago. At the time I started this practice all I could see was everything that was “wrong” in the world. I was wasting so much energy on what didn’t appear to be “right” and was looking for a way to shift that […]