It is Super Bowl time. For many, the game is primary, while for others, the commercials are looked forward to with just as much anticipation. With a huge number of people watching the game, advertisers have long focused huge amounts of effort and revenue in creating ads that will be talked about long after the final whistle blows on the game. In recent years, some companies have made a name for themselves with racy, sexually-charged ads that have gotten talked about, which is the goal, I guess. Most companies have started to turn away from this style of commercial (thankfully). It is reported that even GoDaddy.com, one of the first…

I literally couldn’t breathe. It was an overwhelming feeling. It came at a place and in a time I was not expecting. This is just how grief goes. It was a Wednesday morning and I was in the Kroger supermarket in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. I had gone back for a visit to see my mom and grandparents. It had been at least six months since my father had been taken from us by a sudden and unexpected death. But I was reliving the anxiety of the separation all over again. If you are not a spring chicken you probably know about the senior discount at Kroger. If you are sixty or…

Those of us “of a certain age” remember when Art Linkletter had a television program based on the idea that children often say some very funny things. The program was very entertaining and it lasted a number of years. It is, indeed, true that children often say some very, very funny things. It is also true that, often, children say some things that are very honest and true. That point was driven home to me a number of years ago when our children were still at home. During one of our family vacations, we spent some time at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois.  As we viewed some of the…

For the past couple of years, there seems to have been a trend of people selecting a single word to focus on for each year. The word typically represents some area of life in which the person wants to improve, or at the very least, in which he/she wants to focus. In late 2013, I thought about doing this for 2014, but (honestly) just never selected my word. I thought about it, but just did not put any real time into it, so I let it go. However, as 2014 wound down and 2015 approached, I knew this was something I wanted to try. Moving and the holidays made it…

In 2013, I began meeting monthly with a wonderful group of young men in what I call a “mentoring group.” After just a handful of meetings, I knew this was something that I was going to really enjoy doing. In fact, after just three meetings, I blogged about it in a post called “Inside My Mentoring Group.” Now, it has (almost) been two years. My 2014 group will be having our final meeting in early January, as my moving led to no available dates in December. Still, we are all committed to meeting for the final time and growing closer together. After a great year with my 2013 group and…

A few weeks ago, the national conversation–especially online–turned for a few moments to pictures of Kim Kardashian. The model had a series of photographs taken for a magazine (that I had never heard of), which showed her in various stages of undress. The shoot ended with fully nude photos of the star. (No, I have not seen them, and do not want to.) While these pictures were considered “soft core” pornography, they did lead to some conversation over the nature of the entire pornography industry. There can be no doubt that our society is far more sexualized than it was even just a few years ago. That manifests itself in everything…