by Stacey Denny | Dec 8, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
This is our first Sunday back since Thanksgiving, which this year was a modest affair at the Gulley home. This was the year many in our family dined with their in-laws, so our usual crowd of twenty-five was down to nine. For the first time in 30 years, there wasn’t an...
by Stacey Denny | Dec 8, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I bumped into a man this past week whom I’ve known since we were in the first grade. It’s funny, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re still back in first grade and that nothing has changed. We’re still six years old in Mrs. Mann’s class. Of course, that isn’t...
by Stacey Denny | Nov 17, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I’ve been fascinated by politics since 1974, when Richard Lugar first ran for the United States Senate against Birch Bayh and lost. During the campaign, my dad gave me a box of Richard Lugar pamphlets to distribute around the town, which became my after-school job....
by Stacey Denny | Oct 30, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
We spent part of the week down at Sam and Kelsea’s house, visiting our grandchildren. It was fall break down there, so kids were out in full force, riding their bicycles up and down the streets and playing football in the side yards. The family next door home schools...
by Stacey Denny | Oct 17, 2025 | Uncategorized
When our kids were little, the Harry Potter books arrived on the American literary scene, much to the dismay of Evangelical Christians who urged parents not to buy the books for their children because Harry Potter was a wizard, a vocation specifically prohibited by...
by Stacey Denny | Oct 17, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
Joan sends her regards. Our daughter-in-law Kelsea phoned us last Thursday to tell us her contractions had started. I tell you; less planning went into the Normandy Invasion than went into this delivery. Here was the plan: Our daughter-in-law would phone us when her...
by Stacey Denny | Oct 17, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
Wealth7 Wealth Is An Addiction Philip Gulley I visited my alma mater, Marian University, several weeks ago. I had met the president, and he invited me to tour the campus with him, so off we went on a golf cart and saw the sights. I think he thinks I have more money...
by Stacey Denny | Oct 17, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
When I was nine-years-old, my parents moved to a stately old house on the south side of Danville, which is how I acquired my southern accent. The house had been built in 1913 for a Quaker minister and had a double parlor where Quaker weddings were held. When I was...
by Stacey Denny | Aug 13, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
When we had our house renovated twenty years ago, I had bookshelves built in my office, which are now stacked with books in haphazard piles. They were once arranged by topic, but now they’re arranged by convenience, the books I never read toward the back, and the ones...
by Stacey Denny | Aug 13, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was up on the ladder last month cleaning our gutters and noticed our 30-year roof that was installed 18 years ago already needs replaced. The month before I had replaced our 80,000-mile tires after 49,000 miles, and just before that I replaced a half dozen LED light...
