Writings
Yesterday morning, before retreating to do my writing, I did a little reading of the newspaper….that hybrid thing the News and Free Press pony up to print on Saturday. Imagine my surprise to discover that the three most interesting stories, relative to Mother’s Day, were deadly.
Sometime during the evening of Thursday, January 20, after the last program of a busy church had ended and the last member of that busy church had left, the church’s pastor….the only pastor the church had ever known….the pastor who had started it from scratch and nurtured it from a handful of visitors to over 800 members….the pastor who, in ten crazy, wonderful and relentlessly-forward-surging years, had led those members from the auditorium of an elementary school to a beautiful facility known as Christ United Methodist Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina….
I never knew Leo Sullivan but, according to the Detroit Free Press, he died the other day….right between Wilma Sugar and Lester Utterback. Or, as a semi-regular scanner of the death notices once said to me: “Isn’t it amazing how, day after day, all those people die in alphabetical order?” Whatever! Leo was 80 when he succumbed, one suspects to heart disease, given that memorials (in lieu of flowers) were directed to his best friend and cardiologist, Dr. Kim Eagle of the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center.
Thomas Long is a most interesting fellow who presently does full-time what I am soon to do part-time….namely, teach divinity students a little bit about preaching. In his most recent book, Testimony: Talking Ourselves Into Being Christian, he reports the following:
