Sterling Griggs

My wife and I were sitting on the porch the other day sipping coffee together and reminiscing about how easy life was when we were little kids. We tend to do that from time to time when our schedules get out of whack and it feels as if the calendar is our nemesis rather than sheets of paper held by magnets to our refrigerator. Memories have the ability to allow you to escape like that. On this particular morning we were talking about our grandparents on our mothers' sides, all of whom have already passed on from this world. I brought up the old show Hee Haw  that I watched on so many Saturday evenings in my grandparents living room when my wife lit up and told me about the many times that she too had lounged in her pajamas in her grandmother's living room in Topeka, KS, and watched Roy Clark and Buck Owens lead a cheesy cast of comedic characters across the old tube television set with the wood grained sides.  My wife never had the pleasure of knowing her grandfather as a chil...

I took my middle and high school students to camp this past week and we had a great time with all the stuff camp brings - lack of sleep, filthy living conditions, every middle schooler wanting to challenge my manhood, stuff like that. But it was so good to have our students together for a week away from most distractions (we let them have their phones one hour every night, the rest of the time they are in the "Box of Woe") and to focus them more on Jesus and what He wants for their lives. Now when you gather over 1,000 students in one place from churches all over the map, you know you are going to get a mixed bag of personalities and backgrounds in that place. Where I live, church is usually an afterthought, so many of my students don't have a church background and really don't understand church culture, which is perfectly fine with me. It's refreshing to have a clean slate with so many of them when it comes to questions of faith and how to live it out. I don'...

I didn't sleep in much during the summers when I was a kid, not when there was so much to do each day. From the moment I finished my bowl of Froot Loops in the morning until the sun went down and I knew to come home when I heard my mom hollering for me, summers were made for playing outside. My neighborhood was filled with other kids close to my age, so there was never a shortage on things to do and places to explore. But without a doubt my fondest summer memories involved the Sandihill Swimming Pool that we joined when I was in kindergarten. Sandihill was unlike any other swimming pool on the planet. It wasn't Olympic size or some luxurious, gated private club. Instead, it was a pool tucked away in a neighborhood next to ours that felt like the best kept secret. What made that pool so special was the people and the memories that were made there. It was there that I learned to swim, not because I took lessons but rather because I jumped into the shallow end one day and figured ...