The sails frame the clouds, like a door frame across the threshold of my home. I’m transported to the Missouri River, can feel the humidity in the thickness of the clouds, and smell the pungent odor of the water. The Missouri’s beauty is wide and deep, framed by cliffs and hills that buttress the prairie…
Ecclesiastes 3:18 “I also thought, where human beings are concerned, God tests them to show them that they are but animals 19 because human beings and animals share the same fate. One dies just like the other—both have the same life-breath. Humans are no better off than animals because everything is pointless. 20 All go…
When they run and play, the three dogs know exactly how to move in a synchronized dance of delight. Brindle, a gray Standard Poodle, leaps with a lightness to her being as she bounds across the field. As the youngest of the dogs, she can outrun and outplay both of her senior male dog friends….
The Hereford’s eyes, dark with thick lashes, get to me every time. Why do I eat some animals and not others? If I believe cattle are created in the image of God, what does that mean when I eat a steak? I look again into the Hereford’s eyes which look back at me. I’m consumer,…
On a hazy summer morning, Sheila and I drive 30 miles to the east end of Canton, South Dakota to see a fence. The fence in the distance holds one of South Dakota’s most painful secrets. Located between the fourth and fifth holes of the Hiawatha Golf Course, the fence surrounds a cemetery where 121…
After we buried the ashes of St. Benedict’s Wilfrid, our 10-year-old Airedale Terrier, I was horrified to see our new puppy, a 10-week-old Goldendoodle, digging up the ashes and rolling in them. What at one moment I found disturbing, the next moment I found rather amusing if not fitting. In the strangest of ways, I…