Heaven

Two days ago I took Pinky, our young cat, in for her second flu shot.  She’s eight months old now and nearly full grown, so I can’t really call her a kitten. As I got up to go to the register, I heard the clerk speaking to someone about when they could “pick up the ashes.”  My heart sank. When I got to the desk I saw the customer: a tall youngish man with his…

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Angry Conversations In Chinese

I was pleasantly surprised a year ago when my agent told me a Chinese publisher wanted to buy the rights to my book in Mandarin. My story feels so American; I didn’t imagine how a Mandarin audience would track with it. But I smiled, said thank you and took the money. I found out it was published a couple weeks ago, when I received an email from a reader in Taiwan. You’d think that someone…

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Love or Controversy Wins?

In case you’ve been living under an ecclesial rock, last month Rob Bell released a video promoting his upcoming book, Love Wins. He asks, “Do you know if Ghandi is in Hell? Are you sure?” From there, neo-Calvinist John Piper tweeted, “Farewell Rob Bell. ” The twitterverse lit up like napalm, flaming Bell as a universalist heretic, or Piper as an exclusionary thug. I spied on some twiter discussion and observed a slick chick in…

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Fun With Flammables

Well today was fun. I was going to head down to Orange County for the last day of a conference.  Larry had just left for the day. I went to the bathroom to shower and primp.  I turned on the shower to get the hot water going, used the loo, lit a couple matches to clear the air [sorry, it’s part of the story], waved the matches out and extinguished them in the sink for…

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