he manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate the produce of Canaan. (Joshua 5:12) In the classic Depression-era film The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family piled everything they owned onto a flatbed truck and headed…
They blew up the first Pasadena State Bank building today. Yes, I know today we call it an implosion. But this was a building of the 1960s, and in my youth, turning a 12-story steel and concrete tower into dust meant you blew it up. More Than a BankGrowing up in Pasadena, First Pasadena State…
By the second year of pandemic teaching, exhaustion had settled in like a fog. Lessons felt heavier, students more distant, and the energy I once carried into the classroom drained away. I kept moving—grading, planning, adjusting—but often wondered if I had the strength to finish the year. What carried me wasn’t technology or training, but people: colleagues, family, and the quiet resilience we found together. Survival gave way to something deeper. We learned that even in uncertainty, strength grows step by step, and sometimes just finishing the journey is itself a victory.
When schools closed and classrooms went online, I thought technology would carry us through. Laptops, webcams, and digital platforms promised connection, maybe even innovation. Instead, I stared at blank screens and muted microphones, unsure if anyone was really on the other side. Teaching became a strange mix of isolation and improvisation—part lesson plan, part troubleshooting call. I learned quickly that technology can support learning, but it cannot replace presence. The real work of teaching has never been about the tools in our hands, but the people on the other end.
A school year really does feel like a rollercoaster. You strap in, ready or not, and the chain pulls you up that first hill—names to learn, lessons to plan, routines to set. Then come the drops and turns: surprise assemblies, lessons gone sideways, and the kid who asks to go to the bathroom right after the bell. There are slow climbs too, like grading piles that never shrink. But every ride has its high points—student breakthroughs, laughter, small wins. And just when the ride stops, you find yourself back in line, ready to go again.
I taught in ten different classrooms before real stability—floated through schools like a substitute in my own career. Then came asbestos, portables, fire‑alarms that never shut off—and the refrain: “carry on like normal.” If harnessing chaos was a policy, we aced it. Now, “normal” feels almost fictional. And after 9/11 and hurricanes, COVID has rewritten even that. Maybe what needs to be normal is our care—not business, not calm, but our commitment to one another, even when the world tells us to act otherwise.
Assume you could put seatbelts on every new school bus produced each year for $100 million. Further assume that all kids would wear the seatbelts and, as a result, 3 children who would have otherwise died in a bus accident, would be saved. Then I pose the question: Would you vote to spend $100 million…
The people in these pages are not stained-glass figures. They are not monuments to be admired from a careful distance. Many of them are liars. Some are cowards. A few simply quit. All of them were chosen and used by God anyway.
Liars, Cowards, Quitters & Me: God’s Unlikely Recruits looks at twelve biblical lives that don’t fit the flannel-board version — and pairs each one with a story from the author’s own. The writing is honest, often funny, and never once preachy.