There was a little boy in a village in northern Ghana, West Africa. He was wearing the only piece of clothing he owned, a scruffy pair of cotton underwear. They were dirty, at least the part that remained of them was dirty.

“The lightning struck a Transformer.” Those were the words I heard my dad say to my mom as the power went out. We didn’t often have storms where I grew up, and even when we did, they were short-lived and mild. But not this one.

I need to preface this article by stating that the title, "Beauty, the Invisible Embrace," is not original with me. The book by that title was written by John O'Donahue, an Irish poet, author, priest, and philosopher.

Grandma Shelton was raised near the tiny White County town of Sidon. Across the hills to the east was the settlement of Clay where my Grandfather Shelton grew up. Grandma once said the only thing she used to know about “that Shelton bunch” was that they “drank and made music.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon, from my vantage in Sue's sofa in her joyously-festooned den, I reveled in the comforting rise and fall of familiar women's voices. I admired golfing Santas frozen in mid-swing on her mantel.

Take a few minutes and go on YouTube and listen to the song “Mary Did You know”. The second verse ends with the last two lines,

Did you know

that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?

When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

The man in the eighteen-wheeler pulled into the parking area of my dad’s restaurant. He had gotten into the habit of parking his big rig there over the weekends. Dad went out and asked him to move his truck, explaining that his customers needed the area for parking.

There are many movies and shows about time travel. There's "Dr. Who," "Back to the Future," "Star Trek," "Harry Potter," "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," "Groundhog's Day," "Quantum Leap," "Gravity Falls," and the list goes on and on. Where did this concept come from?

Testing. It is a word many of us do not like. Why do we have such a distain for testing? It may be we don’t like to know that we don’t know everything we should. Or maybe we dread testing because we feel like it is a trial by fire.

Wenchiki is the name of the first village we drilled a water well in. It was very remote and the road into it was not much more than a path. Wenchiki had a population of over 2,000, and the folks there were all farmers and all very poor.

Harry Tate was quite unlike any man I have ever known. He was a genuine Ozark product. He was a farmer by occupation, but a country philosopher at heart. He witnessed a lot of change in his eighty-five years, and he liked to discuss how it “was a sight on earth what the mind of man can conceive.” He was also an artist.

Wouldn’t you like to hear some good news? We all would! Bad news brings fear, pain, and sorrow; but “good news refreshes the bones” (Prov 15:30). “Like cold water to a thirsty soul,” declares another proverb, “so is good news from a far country” (Prov 25:25). Isn’t it time for some good news?