So This is What Sin Looks Like

One movie I can never pass by when flipping through the channels on television is A Few Good Men. In the movie, Tom Cruise played a military lawyer, named Daniel Kaffee, who defended two U.S. Marines charged with killing a fellow Marine at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Kaffee was essentially a used car salesman lawyer, who exclusively negotiated plea bargains, to the extent he had never seen the inside of a courtroom. Because higher ups did not want a trial, Kaffee was chosen over more qualified lawyers to take the case. After a dramatic courtroom scene, Kaffee turned around while exiting and remarked, “So this is what a courtroom looks like.”

Teaching Children About Protecting Their Reputations

One thing parents often preach to their children is the importance of protecting their reputations. I am one of those and have preached that to my children many times. But recently I heard my preaching regurgitated to me by one of my sons and a glaring omission was revealed to me.

The Enchanted Doorknob

Some of you may have already read it, but my short story, The Enchanted Doorknob, was published on Altarwork.com today. If you have a few minutes, please check out the Altarwork site and provide feedback on the post there.  Here is the link:

The Enchanted Doorknob

Thanks,
TheDaddyBlitz

Parachutes Upon The Wind

My short story, Parachutes Upon the Wind, was published on Altarwork.com yesterday. If you have a few minutes, please check out the Altarwork site and provide feedback on the post there.

Parachutes Upon The Wind

 

A Christian Response to the 2016 Presidential Election

Social media and cable news are abuzz with diatribes and vitriol over the 2016 Presidential Election. If you support the Taz, apparently you are a racist, a liar, a misogynist, and a demagogue.

If you support Yosemite Sam, then apparently you are corrupt, a liar and a murderer . . .

and you REALLY love pant suits.

The Plight of the Long Nose

Guilty! Guilty! Lock her up!

The crowd’s chanting cut her to the bone.

With a trembling hand, she tucked her black hair behind her ear and stared at the ground, shame repelling eye contact with her accusers, whose judgmental stares traveled long along the haughty nose.

Guilty! Guilty! Lock her up!

M.A.S.K.D.

Booming, throbbing bass bludgeoned her brain while blackened goth revelers thrashed and bobbed about in a daze, a grotesque menagerie bewitched by the darkness and the dead. Garish locks and bloodied bodies blazed beneath demonic strobes spiraling above the dizzying hoard worshiping in the night’s mass. A macabre brew of black and sweat dripped and smeared across Clisby’s blanched face, rendering a vision of walking death, a coveted ticket to conformity. But the bedlam disturbed the nauseous beast bathing within her sloshing belly, and she bolted for the dark passage through which she had descended into the gloom, bombarded and bruised along the way by blurry, bumping bodies pulsing and gyrating to the blaring cacophony.

Pew Shakers

While sitting in church this past Sunday with 3 of my 5 boys, I suddenly felt the pew shaking during the sermon. I glanced to my left, and two of my boys were in the midst of a “try hard not to laugh when you aren’t supposed to” moment.

Most of us have been there–when laughter is mercilessly suppressed by silence and scorn, causing tears to leak from the eyes and the body to tremble.

Wile E. Coyote Parenting

Wile E. Coyote is one of my favorite characters from Looney Tunes. Why? Because I can identify with him. When I parent, I am Wile E. Coyote.

Top 20 Values to Teach Children

Below is a list of values that my wife and I are constantly trying to instill in our children. This is not an exclusive list, and many overlap, but these are the top items on my parenting agenda (my wife may have others) as we shepherd our children.