My wife and I met at a church where the preaching was worth showing up for. It was a place where scripture was treated as something you could work through — where God was rational and supernatural at the same time and nobody made you choose. The community was real. We were known there. That's … Continue reading Running On Fumes
This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug. Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code. I could do that by … Continue reading Left Click Or Right Click
We watched Down Periscope tonight. I've loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks. I quote it more than I should. There's a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at … Continue reading Excellence Knows No Age
There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I'd hauled it up there myself. Toward the end I'd go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people … Continue reading Ok, So Now What?
The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars. I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came … Continue reading Three Hundred Dollars
David Willis 