After a long hiatus, I’ve returned to my first love, which is writing. I started blogging in 2004, using the Blogger platform. The blog was titled “Fires Along the Tallgrass. ” When I started blogging, my wife, Nancy, and I had just moved to the Kansas Flint Hills. I used the blog as a platform as a place to view “my life and times through the prism of the Kansas Flint Hills.” Between 2004 and January 2019 I published 645 posts and over a million words of text. They were productive years and I enjoyed them immensely. The archives for that blog are in the following link: If you care to, you can peruse those archives at your leisure. anothermansmeat.blogspot.com
Why have I jump-started my writing. I’m a “Christian pilgrim who is trying to “navigate his way through an increasingly hostile world.” I’ve decided that I need to express my sense of these times to encourage myself and to also encourage fellow Christian pilgrims who are also trying to navigate their way along that “narrow road.”
As with almost everything in life, change comes. We are now living in Kansas City and have since July of 2019. We’ve purchased a Queen Anne home in the Pendelton Heights neighborhood. The home was built in 1885, which makes in very conducive to quiet reflection. It also helps stir the creative juices to live in such an eclectic neighborhood. Some of our neighbors are young families who are taking advantage of city generated incentives to sink down roots. Some are from different cultures. We live right across the street from a Vietnamese Buddhist temple. A few blocks from here there is a sizable contingent of Somalis, with a sprinkling of Hispanics dotted around.
Pendelton Heights is not Camelot. A few blocks from here, the homeless congregate along the highway entrances along the Paseo looking for handouts. At night the sound of police sirens abound. There are porch pirates aplenty and plenty of dust-ups along Independence Avenue east of here. There are even occasional bursts of gunfire in the distance.
It makes life quite interesting
I’m old enough and wise enough to know that the path I’ve chosen has more than likely marked me as a member of the minority report. American society has become far less interested in the life of faith than it was even a generation ago. That’s alright. One of my favorite films, 1961’s “The Hoodlum Priest,” has a brief conversation in one of the final scenes that goes something like this !
Prison guard, speaking to a protester at the scene of an execution – “You’re not gonna’ change the world carrying the sign, buddy.”
The Protester – “I’m not trying to change the world. I’m just trying to keep the world from changing me!”
So, that’s it in a nutshell. I’m not trying to change the world, either. I’m just trying to keep the world from changing me.
If you are a fellow Christian pilgrim, I hope the things I write will encourage you.