Charity – Perpetual Adoration

April 10, 2021

True Friendship and Mercy

When my three oldest daughters — Anna, Maria, and Laura — were teenagers, they got involved in community theater. In one of the first plays they participated in, they became good friends with one of the girls in the play. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call their friend “Julia.”

February 21, 2021

Superior Talent on Loan from God

You’ve probably never heard of Robert Pittman. He’s a 67-year-old American businessman who was one of the founders of MTV, the first cable music television network in the United States. MTV was launched on August 1, 1981, and initially featured music videos and related programming that was presented by television celebrities who were known as VJs (video jockeys).

February 14, 2021

Love, A Criminal & Valentine’s Day

My first jury trial was in 1983, the same year that I started practicing law. I was the attorney for a young woman who had been charged in federal criminal court for embezzling money from a local bank. After that case, I continued to accept criminal defense cases for several years. In one of those cases, I represented a young man who was charged with a serious crime. The evidence against him was overwhelming, and he was found guilty of the crime. At the sentencing hearing, he told the judge that he had discovered God, and he was a changed man. The judge responded to his comment by stating,

January 2, 2021

You Have the Power to be Invincible

What do you think you could accomplish if you were invincible?

December 5, 2020

The Reflector Theory

When I was born (May 1957), my mom asked her 17-year-old brother, Dick LaHood, if he would be my godfather. My earliest memory of my Uncle Dick is from the early 1960s when he would pick up me and several of my brothers and sisters in his Cadillac and take us swimming at the Timber Lake Club.

December 28, 2019

Happiness For The Next Decade

I recently listened to an interview of a business consultant who said that he blames Thomas Jefferson for many of the problems in the United States, because Jefferson was the one who came up with the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The consultant said that he had no problem with the life and liberty part of the phrase, but that Jefferson’s use of the words “pursuit of happiness” was a mistake.

June 14, 2019

What “Truths” Govern Your Life?

My wife and I were married in June 1980, which was a month after I finished my first year in law school. One of the weekly television shows that we watched together during the first year of our marriage was the prime-time soap opera, Dallas. We’ve come a long way since then. Today, there’s no way we would waste our time on that type of show.

December 15, 2018

A Valuable Cheat Sheet For Growth & Perfection

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of willingly choosing to accept less freedom in order to become something greater than what we already are. When we choose to consistently give up certain freedoms, we become much more responsible, and we are eventually able to achieve more than we would have ever thought was possible. This is a critical concept that must be understood and practiced by those of us who are serious about becoming what God intended us to be.

June 9, 2018

A 4-Year-Old Superhero Emerges

In 1976, during the spring semester of my freshman year in college, I got in my car and drove to the local Western Union office. When I walked in, I told the clerk at the counter that I wanted to send a telegram. At that time, a telegram was a written message that was sent by telegraph from one Western Union office to a Western Union office in a different city. The second Western Union office would then make arrangements to hand-deliver the message to the intended recipient.