Category: Places That Shape Us
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Some Places Become Holy Simply Because We Lived There
I’ve lived in Springfield, Missouri, for thirteen years now. That may not seem like a long time to some people, but for me, it is the longest I have ever lived in one city. I’ve also lived in the same apartment for ten years, another personal record. For most of my life, I was a…
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Some Places Become Holy Simply Because We Lived There
We all feel disconnected at times. I never met my maternal or paternal grandparents. They had all died before I was born, so I grew up knowing very little about my family’s story. In the 1990s, my oldest sister, Sue, and I began researching our genealogy. The deeper we dug, the more I discovered that…
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Some Places Become Holy Simply Because We Live There
In 2003, I was appointed by the Hattiesburg District Superintendent of the Mississippi Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church to serve as pastor of West Laurel United Methodist Church in Laurel, Mississippi. The appointment felt like coming home. My mother and father were both raised in east Jones County. When I was twelve, our…
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Places That Shape Us: Where History Became Personal
Today our nation marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the birth of what became the United States of America. Over the years, I have traveled through 46 of the continental United States. Only Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, and South Dakota remain unseen. Every state has offered something worth…
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Farm Life in Greene County, Mississippi
Some places do not just hold memories — they form you. For me, one of those sacred places was our farm in northwest Greene County, Mississippi, in the 1950s. It sat on the Union to Piave Road, a narrow dirt road that ran east to west and crossed Lovewell Road on the other side of…
The Curious Pilgrim 