Thanksgiving – Perpetual Adoration

November 6, 2021

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Where Are You on the Approachability Index?

I periodically receive a letter or email from someone who has never communicated with me but has written to me because he wants to complain about something I wrote. He usually starts out by saying that he has been reading my articles for a while and that he sometimes agrees with me. Then he drops the hammer on me by complaining about a topic I wrote about.

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.

November 28, 2020

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The Season of Gratitude

During the Thanksgiving season, we usually hear and read about all the blessings we should be thankful for, such as our faith, health, family, country, and freedoms. The one common denominator in these blessings is that they were all given to us as gifts.

August 22, 2020

Your Best Friend Can Also Be Your Worst Enemy

What if you were able to control the behavior of your best friend? What if you were able to control the behavior of your worst enemy? What if you could turn your worst enemy into your best friend?

September 15, 2018

A Formula for Conquering Loneliness

I’ve written before about how I grew up in a family neighborhood that included seven families. My grandparents, Tom and Effie Williams, lived next door to my parents. The other families in the neighborhood were made up of my aunts, uncles, and cousins.

December 9, 2017

Managing Your Anger

One of the ten principal virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary was “continual mental prayer.” During her life, the Blessed Mother was constantly in tune with God’s will. Every morning she woke up thinking about God, she thought about Him continually throughout the day, and she went to bed thinking about Him. She was “the new Eve,” who possessed the same preternatural gifts that Adam and Eve possessed before they sinned.

November 18, 2017

Thank God I’m a Catholic Boy

In March 1975, during my senior year in high school, country music singer John Denver released a new single record with the song, Thank God I’m a Country Boy. That year, only six songs made it to the top of both the Billboard Hot Country Singles Charts and the Billboard Hot 100.

November 26, 2016

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Are you on the take?

Last weekend, after Mass at St. Philomena Church, a young woman in her 20s approached me and asked if I would write an article about what it means to show praise and thanksgiving to our Lord. The celebration of the Mass had been in honor of Christ the King and she felt that the upcoming Thanksgiving and Advent seasons provided a perfect opportunity for us to praise and thank God for what he has done for us.

November 12, 2016

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An Unlikely Tag Team

Last month, Georgette and I attended a retirement party for Dr. Ed Kaizer. The party was at Bradley University, where Dr. Kaizer taught music for 45 years. We got to know Dr. Kaizer during the early 1990s, when our three oldest children — Harry, Anna, and Maria — were students at Bradley. They were all involved in the music program at Bradley and each of them had the opportunity to take piano lessons from Dr. Kaizer.