Terry Barnes's Blog

 I failed the Office Inspection the other day. You see as writer and online college professor who has a home office, I must maintain professional habits and standards. To assist in this effort, I am subjected to random inspections, and the last one, indeed a surprise, happened the other day. “Wow,” I said. “This is quite a surprise.” The inspector, an older female of Irish

“We have small lives,” she said. And so we do.



This Saturday night we are watching a football game, the volume on the TV low and nearly inaudible. She quilts, I read, yet together we watch the game. This activity is very different from what we did together forty years earlier. 



In fact life is different from what we thought it would be. The dreams of yesterday have been unanswered in

As you must suspect, the love of coffee is a prerequisite for being a writer. I like mine strong and rich and accented by a bit of cream.

But there’s more to writing than just coffee. Quality writing is where we search for meaning in the swirl of life, where we use the power of language to explore the wonder and ambiguity of our common humanity and the eternity to come.

Shallow and frivolous

Nothing offends us more than to have a coworker receive the same wage for less work. Quite honestly, it’s not fair.



Yet in Matthew Chapter 20, Jesus tells such a story. This is a story of a landowner who goes to the marketplace at six in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He negotiates with them for a denarius, a generous day’s wage, then sends them off to work. At nine in the

Our lives are full of events; things happen. We live with them daily. Events have a beginning, a complication, and then a conclusion of some sort. Then we proceed to our next life event.







In fact our lives are not only a series of events, but also a series of overlapping events. For example, we have an event concerning our aging parents during the same timeframe as the appeal to the

I
have completed Wilson, the biography
of our 28th President, by A. Scott Berg. Mr. Berg wanted to write a
biography that captured, “the essence of Wilson’s character,” and in many ways
he succeeded.



Wilson,
a Presbyterian, was a controversial man who tried to seek the higher moral
ground in political issues. However, he behaved inconsistently much of the time,
both in Washington and during

I have
a quick question.



Let's
say that after church I want to rush home and watch some afternoon football.
But first I'll stop in downtown Lawrence to pick up a Chipotle burrito for a
carry out lunch (probably a grilled chicken with sour cream and cheese).



Now
the question. As I rush downtown, do I pray for a parking place?



If we
say yes to the question, that would be selfish and

Children
are full of questions, but it’s usually the
five-year-old boy who asks this one. You know the kid. He'll be running around
the place with his toy plane, swishing it around and making noise. Then all of
a sudden he'll turn to you and ask, "What does God look like?"



And
there you stand.



Adults
don’t ask such
questions. They don’t have the time for
such things. Also there are the

We all make mistakes. We all have slips of the tongue, or
sometimes fingers on the keyboard. Online college students who are taking a
religion class are no exception.  The following
are some that have crossed my computer screen over the years, copied as they
originally appeared.







From submitted papers



I’m
thankful for the freedoms I have and the ability to cast a vote at the expense
of

So what’s a college professor doing driving a dump truck?





One of my boys needed help.



We were at the diggins, the boy’s new house, and we needed
to move dirt from the back of the poured foundation to the front of the
property. To do this we used a skid loader and a dump truck, with the skid
loader operator, the boy, being the more skilled of the two operators. After
all, he had once