Sterling Griggs

The other weekend my wife and I enjoyed some much needed beach time with our toes in the sand watching the waves crash onto the shore. As we lazily sat in our chairs soaking up the sun and breathing in the salty air, we noticed a girl approaching that we recognized, which is not all that uncommon since we do live beside the beach. She stopped to say hello and we casually asked her how things were going with her. To our surprise, she told us. Everything. I mean, she let us know where she had been so far this summer, who she hung out with, how her parents were doing, etc. She didn't give the typical answers, " Things are good...I'm fine...been busy... " No, she actually answered the question that we asked her. Which was surprising, because normally when we ask people how they are doing we don't really find out how they are doing because they typically don't tell us how they are doing, because that's not really what we want to hear, right? Instead, we exp...

God, first let me thank you for this new day You have given to me. From where I sit, I can see blue sky and the sun shining. What a gift! A new day to live and move and breathe. I couldn't ask for much more. Thank You! I'm also incredibly grateful for forgiveness. Without Your forgiveness, God, I would have no idea how to forgive others. Oh, and I'm really thankful for grace. Without Your grace, I would be a big mess. God, Your grace is amazing! You know God, there is a lot of junk going on in our world, stuff that weighs heavy on my heart. It seems like different groups of people just keep on hating each other and there seems to be no room for dialogue or resolution. Father God, forgive me for getting caught up in hate during my life, for viewing other people through the lens of fear and mistrust instead of seeing them as in desperate need of Your love and grace. I know that I can't change people, but You can. You give Your love and grace freely to me; how can I w...

The town that I live in, Southport, is a sleepy little movie set kind of town nestled on the coast of North Carolina. In fact, they regularly film movies and TV shows here (most recent being Safe Haven and parts of the Under the Dome TV series). As a result, for many months out of the year my town becomes a glorified tourist trap complete with gawking visitors and snail-going-uphill-backward-slow kind of drivers. We have come to affectionately call this the Southport Crawl. It can be annoying but we've learned to live with it. Normally by now traffic crawls at a decently faster pace so that when I have to get from point A to point B it doesn't take me nearly as long. Yet I was not surprised when on my way home today from picking my two daughters up from middle school, traffic had slowed to an obnoxiously slow crawl. 5 MPH. No joke. There were a few cars in front of me, but I could easily see the culprit - a little red pickup truck with its right turn blinker apparently s...