by Stacey Denny | Mar 25, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
It is good to be home. I was in North Carolina last weekend, officiating at the wedding of my niece, Lauren, the daughter of my oldest brother Glenn, who is as white as white can be. Here’s how white my brother is. When he retired two years ago, he bought a pick-up...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 25, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
A year after I was born, my father was hired by Johnson Wax as a salesman, visiting grocery stores across Indiana, peddling his wares, mostly Raid bug spray and Pledge furniture polish. Then in 1970, the shaving cream world was rocked when Johnson Wax invented Edge...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 6, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
Last week, we began thinking about the things that give us hope in these challenging days, because it is far too easy to feel hopeless, so we need to think intentionally about the developments that give us hope, and I said one thing that gave me hope were the...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 6, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was thinking this week of Mr. Hoban, an elderly neighbor of ours when I was growing up on Broadway Street, there in Danville. He was a veteran of two wars—World War I and World War II. He was so gentle and kind, his activity as a soldier seemed incongruent with the...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 6, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I learned this week that a kid I knew growing up had passed away. This seems to be happening with more frequency, and I am usually saddened by the development, but this time I had mixed feelings. I met him when I was ten years old, and my family moved across town to a...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 22, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was up at Life’s Journey this week visiting Stacey Denny’s mother, who’s in hospice there. They have a bookshelf in the lobby filled with religious books, including a book called Heaven, written by a man named Randy Alcorn, whom I met 30 years ago when I started...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 20, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I’ve been thinking this week of my Baptist grandmother, who took it upon herself to make us fit for civilization. Fortunately, I didn’t see her often. When my father and mother were first married, they moved 120 miles away from her, to give themselves a little...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 20, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
When I became an intentional Christian, as opposed to a Christin who was dragged kicking and screaming to church by my mother, I decided to read the Bible. I did that for several years, because a man I knew told me the government would confiscate all the Bibles, which...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 20, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I’ve been thinking about Georgie Baker, who last week shared the happy news that she was wrapping up her degree in social work. Georgie was two-years-old when we first met. She would come to meeting with her grandparents, Ralph and Gan, and when the other children...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 20, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
Well, what a good Thanksgiving we had. It might be my favorite holiday. I like the constancy of Thanksgiving, the timelessness. Thanksgiving in 2024 feels like it felt when I was a kid in the 1960s, the same menu, some of the same people, the same conversations, and...
