My Top Five Burgers

I had lunch today with some friends and in the process decided on my top five burgers. And so, in no particular order my top five burgers.

I begin with Billy Ray’s Playhouse Burger. A Prestonsburg favorite. I had this burger often during my five years in that wonderful town. Billy Ray was a real person—I knew both him and his mother. The playhouse was actually a pool room in an earlier time. Some of the old-timers in town could remember that earlier time. There were pictures of various community figures and locations on the walls. Included were the pictures of the school students killed when a school bus went off the road into a flooded creek during the 50s. The burgers are hand patted and grilled.

Second, burgers from Five Guys Burgers and Fries. I ran onto this place while on a family vacation in Washington, D.C. It has become one of my favorites. They recently opened a restaurant in Lexington near where I live. The fries are deep-fried in peanut oil. Great burgers and a great place.

Third, the Dream Catcher Burger from Stan’s Fish Sandwich. I know what you’re thinking. A great burger in a fish joint? It’s true! I had it just today. It is 100% grass-fed angus beef. Seasoned wonderfully. Topped with Swiss cheese, it makes for a great lunch!!

Fourth, Old Bridge Golf Club Grill Cheeseburger. I could eat this burger every week. Just the thought of it makes my mouth water. May have to go to Old Bridge tomorrow!!

Fifth, Jennifer’s hand-patted angus burgers with special fillings. Don’t know what all the special fillings are but onions are part of it. Throw them on the grill and these are great.

Obviously I like hamburgers. American cheese or swiss cheese is a must. Douse them with ketchup, mayonnaise, and sometimes mustard. Add a large glass of southern-style sweet tea and that’s a perfect lunch.

I think I’ll start dreaming now about tomorrow’s lunch

Fall is Here

The signs are clear—fall is in the air. Leaves are beginning to fall off some trees. The weather is cooler—at least where I live. Football games fill the weekend. Plans are in the making for fall festivals, trips to the pumpkin patch, and hayrides. Favorite chili recipes are being shared.

I have always liked the fall season. It ranks as one of my favorites. I don’t have anything against the other seasons. Nor do I have any specific reason for choosing the fall as my favorite. Perhaps the memories associated with the fall have something to do with it.

Those memories include homecoming parades, school festivals, cutting and splitting fire-wood, Friday night high school football games. Sweaters and sweat-shirts are taken off the closet shelf and out of summer storage.

The writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us that “there is a time for everything.” (Eccl. 3:1 NIV) Perhaps what I like about Fall is that it reminds me to slow down life’s pace; to take time to reflect and to grow. I don’t have any particular plans for this season; a lot of hopes perhaps but no firm plans. A trip to the mountains as the vibrant colors begin to set in would be nice. A Saturday afternoon drive would be nice. A trip to the pumpkin patch would create great memories, even though my kids are getting past the age of enjoying such a trip. A weekend get-away with my wife would be great. But no such plans are set yet. Spontaneity may a good thing this year.

This season won’t last. It will give way to winter and winter to spring. Life will continue its ebb and flow. But for now I will soak in all that this Fall has to offer. I will, as I seek to do each season, enjoy the good times Fall brings and learn from the difficult lessons that may come in this seasons journey. I pray that the good days far outweigh the more difficult days.

Fall is here. I welcome its return like an old friend.

Of Blackberries and Summer

Let’s be clear from the start. I love blackberries. I know love is an over-used word. But in this case it expresses well my sentiment. At a restaurant, when others ask for grape jelly for their biscuits, I want blackberry jelly. Don’t even offer me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich unless it’s made with blackberry jelly. Peach cobbler is not even in the running with blackberry cobbler. The only thing more American than baseball are blackberries

My love for blackberries goes back to my childhood when I would pick blackberries at my grandparents. Those blackberries were the wild sort, mind you. Meaning they were difficult to get to, had thorns on them, and were infested with chiggers. A day spent picking blackberries usually ended with a bath with Mama’s homemade Lye soap to kill the chiggers, iodine to heal the scratches, and Calamine lotion to ease the itching. In spite of all that there simply was nothing quite like picking those berries. I still recall with fondness my Mama cooking the berries up into a juice and my Papa squeezing the juice out of the berries through a cheese-cloth. The blackberry jelly I would enjoy the rest of the year has yet to be matched. It made breakfast a truly delicious meal.

The blackberries in my back yard today are the tame sort. No thorns, easy to get to, and chiggers do not find me as easily as they once did. But my yellow lab, Casey, loves to pull the berries off, ripe or not, as we pick them. It is quite the challenge to keep him out of the patch.

We don’t grow enough to make blackberry jelly, but we get enough for Jennifer’s fabulous blackberry pie! There is nothing quite like it either. Add some home made ice cream—blackberry pie a la mode--and summer remains one of those special joys in life.

The berries are just now beginning to ripen and my senses are already anxious for the pie soon to come!! Think I’ll go check the blackberry patch now and taste a berry or two. By the way, did I mention that I love blackberries?!

The Burdensome Joy of Preaching

There’s a phrase that’s been on my mind lately. It’s not original to me. It is from the title of a book by James Earl Massey--The Burdensome Joy of Preaching. (Abingdon Press, 1998) There is obviously a twofold aspect to this wonderful phrase that we preachers are keenly aware of. To say that preaching is a burden is to acknowledge the way in which preparing and delivering a specific sermon for a specific group of people with so many unique needs weighs upon the preacher each week.

Preaching is a joy, though, because of its divine purpose. We preachers sense deeply a calling by God to proclaim God’s love to others through the preaching event. It is a joy as well because, though we don’t always see, we know the redemptive effects that preaching has in and through the lives of individuals and congregations. That effect is not the result of the preacher but rather the result of God’s Holy Spirit working through the entirety of the preaching event and touching both the proclaimer and the listener.

I saw the reality of this phrase in its fullness at the preaching camp for the Academy for Preachers. Young preachers were preaching 4 sermons over a period of 5 days. That doesn’t sound like much. But consider the message that is being proclaimed, the work needed to be prepared, and the challenge of delivering both the Word and words and one can quickly see that their task could be an exhausting one.

Massey quotes Gardner C. Taylor as saying that preacher’s experience is “the sweet torture of Sunday morning.” After 20 plus years of preaching experience I can attest that preaching is indeed a burdensome joy. But would I do anything other than preach? There are times I have considered it. But the divine pull keeps me hooked. I have learned to live in and with that tension—the sweet torture of Sunday morning that is the burdensome joy of preaching.

A Preaching Coach

This week I am a preaching coach. I have helped to coach soccer and baseball—meaning that I watched the kids on the sidelines, picked up the bats and kept up with the batting rotation. Being a preaching coach is a bit different. The Academy of Preachers is holding its first preaching camp at a wonderful Christian retreat center in southern Indiana. There are twelve young preachers, women and men, ranging in age from about 16-28. Some have never attended a seminary. Some have recently graduated from divinity school.

They come from a myriad of denominations—Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Nazarene, and non-denominational. They have all gathered with a common purpose—to improve their preaching skills. During their time here they will be preaching a 6-8 minute sermon each day.

My job as coach is to review those sermons on video with four of the young preachers assigned to me. I am also to offer assistance as they prepare for the next day’s sermon. I am learning to pull from my years of pastoral experience and my coach training to help these young preachers in the short time we are together. I am encouraged by their enthusiasm for communicating the Good News of the Gospel to our world. They desire to be relevant and they yearn to make a difference in the lives of individuals and churches. Already I have heard some very good sermons and I’m sure I can look forward to hearing more in the days ahead. I am amazed at the energy these young people have for a vocation that is no longer given the respect that it once knew and does not find itself in the top lists of ways to make a living. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised because God has always worked in ways that leave us amazed.

Now that I think about it coaching young preachers is not that different from coaching a T-ball team. They both dream of hitting a home run—one with a bat the other with words; they both feel a bit of uncertainty as they step up to the plate; and, they both wouldn’t choose to do or be anything else because they simply love it. Seeing all that adds a certain sense of reward to my job as a coach.

I know that I won’t be a preacher forever. I have been preaching for over twenty years now. I look forward to many years of preaching yet. But one day, though I will continue to share God’s love with others, I may not be doing so from a pulpit. It’s good to know that these young people sense God’s call to step in and continue the preaching ministry that has communicated God’s love to countless numbers of people throughout the ages.

The Parenting Journey

My role as a parent changes constantly. We assume that will be the case when our children are born. But I’m not sure the concept sinks in until those changes are upon us and we become cognizant of them. So we travel along this parenting journey not always seeing what lies just around the bend ahead, not always noticing that little dip in the road, and not prepared to avoid the hole in the road before us. We are travelers nonetheless and we enjoy this parenting journey, even on the difficult days. Along the journey change most certainly comes and typically requires something of us as parents. Sometimes that change is obvious and requires significant adjustments on our part. At other times that change is subtle and not so demanding.

This week I experienced some of the subtle changes of this parenting journey. I decided to give my son some of the responsibility for mowing our yard. A simple change so it seems. But to me, yielding to our thirteen-year-old the control of my Cub Cadet, with the capacity to run over and shred the small trees and blackberries in our yard, was a change I had missed on the horizon of my parenting journey. His mother encouraged the opportunity. Mother’s always have a hand in this father/son plot and tug-of-war that I have yet to fully comprehend and appreciate.

Since I was pressed for time and the yard needed to be mowed and trimmed before the rains came, I surrendered the driver’s seat. I made a few rounds to mark out the boundaries. Our thirteen-year-old, who it seems only yesterday wasn’t heavy enough to hold the seat down so the tractor didn’t automatically shut off, assumed the controls. After learning what buttons did what and which pedal was forward and which was backward, off he was. He insisted, thank God, that I walk along beside him at first. I patiently—thank God for patience—gave directions. After it appeared he had this mowing thing down, I preceded to my task of trimming.

With an ever watchful eye—knowing his mother would want to know that I was keeping a close watch on her baby boy taking on such a dangerous task and anticipating that I might happen to witness the shredding of my blackberry vines—I kept vigil.

It was difficult not to point out that some of the corners were turned to close and as a result some of the grass was not cut. Obviously a more experienced hand—his father’s specifically—would not have made such a miscue. I gently pointed it out and suggested how he could avoid it. When I finished trimming I fought the urge to say, “Let me finish.” “It will be quicker if I do it,” was my reasoning. But I knew his mother was watching and deep down I knew he had to learn somehow. So I watched and pointed with my walking stick. I had to have control on some level, right?!!

At one point he came to me and said, “Hey, Dad!! I think I just ran over the little pine tree!!” The very pine tree I had trimmed around, pointed out to him, and even put a large stake beside so he could see it. “Yeah, Dad, that pine tree.” I took a deep breath. It wasn’t going to make it anyway. In case you’re wondering, the pine tree survived.

Father and son finally finished the task he needed to learn and the change I needed to navigate. He parked the tractor and shut it off and we walked inside.

I don’t remember how old I was when my dad taught me how to mow the yard. I do remember that there were paths of grass that I missed, small trees I cut down, and times I failed to put the oil plug back in after checking the oil. I remember the time I backed the lawn mower over my grandfathers fence and the time I got in stuck in a ditch, the very ditch my dad had pointed out to me, the very ditch he had told me not to get too close to—that ditch. I remember that it was my mom who came to the rescue that time.

All this reminds me, that for ages, parents have been successfully navigating the changing currents of this parenting journey. There will be more changes; some subtle and some not so subtle. That change is a sign of growth both for son and for dad. Thanks be to God!

Tommy

The Journey

It was on March 25th, 1989, Easter Sunday, that my journey began. On that day that I began serving as a pastor. Twenty years and three churches later that journey continues. I remember some very special days through those twenty years. I recall first Sundays in each of the three churches and the last Sundays in two of them along with countless other special memories simply too numerous to mention. While it’s impossible to write of each of those experiences, some come to mind worth sharing.

During my 5 and ½ years in my first pastorate, Mill Creek in Bardstown, Ky, I recall an Easter Sunday when we baptized seven people. Then there was the 200th Anniversary celebration when a pastor who was there during the 1930’s came back for the special occasion. At First Baptist (Irene Cole Memorial) in Prestonsburg, Ky, where I served for 5 years, I remember the morning a call came from the preschool—a rat was in the toilet (they didn’t teach me about this in seminary!) There was also a surprise birthday party given for me by the church one Sunday evening and some fabulous summer fellowships in the shady parking lot (the fried cod fish was out of this world!) Prestonsburg was our home when both our children were born and dedicated.

The journey continued to Lexington Avenue Baptist in Danville, Ky. That Sunday morning when I preached a trial sermon was one to remember—our three year old son was sick with a high fever and our six month old daughter woke up in the hotel room before 5:00 a.m. At that point there was no question but that all was in God’s hands not mine. I remember the Sunday mornings my children made their professions of faith and were later baptized. With fondness and grateful appreciation I remember the way the church family embraced me following the deaths of each of my parents.

What comes to mind more than anything else through this twenty year journey is not a specific day or event, but specific people. I remember by name people who have made this journey of ministry meaningful and fulfilling; who have been patient with me and have helped me to grow; those who have taken the time to nurture me and pray with me. There names are etched on my heart--Hughley and Inath, Woodrow and Narcie, Mike and Rebecca, Connie and John, Randy and Carolyn. They, and others like them, have enriched this journey in ways that I will not soon forget. Even as I write their names my mind is flooded with memories.

I’m not sure I could have imagined, much less guessed, where this journey would lead that Easter Sunday twenty years ago. The journey has not always been easy—but then again, that’s part of the nature of the journey, isn’t it? But what the journey has been is blessed by the presence of God each day. Sometimes I knew it keenly, other days I seemed to be barely aware. But in reflection, God’s presence was indeed there every day of those twenty years. I wonder . . . is that what Abram felt when God told him to leave the land of his fathers and go to a new land, a land God would show him. I don’t know. But I do know the journey continues and only God knows what lies yet before me.

Tommy