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When Harry Truman was president of the United States, his daughter, Margaret, was aspiring to a career in opera.  The music critics had written some rather discouraging things about her future in that particular field.  Finally, she went to a specialist for an assessment of her chances to become an opera star.  After several days of evaluation, the specialist gave her opinion.  She said to Miss Truman, “You have a beautiful voice.  It is big enough and rich enough for opera.  The problem is with your ear.  And because of your ear, you will never attain greatness.” Maybe that same […]

I suppose there are times when everyone longs to recapture the carefree innocence and joy of childhood.  We wish that for just one day we could shake off the burdensome responsibilities of adult life and put our feet under Dad’s table once more.  Admittedly, this emotion carries with it an element of escapism, but it is not necessarily all bad. There are, of course, some characteristics of childhood that we should outgrow and leave behind forever.  Such childish traits as impatience and a total self-centeredness have no place in adult life.  But there are certain basic elements of childhood that […]

To most people the word tragedy denotes some terrible happenings – a plane crash, a grinding automobile accident, a catastrophic disease, a flood.  The possibilities are endless, and each of these happenings can be accurately defined as tragic.  But tragedy has another meaning.  It can also denote something good that could have happened and should have happened but did not. This understanding of tragedy should remind us that the power of God most often awaits the cooperation of people.  And the tragedy is that most of us are unaware of it.  In our generation, we need to understand how the […]