One of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Appalachian Trail is the white blaze. A blaze is a distinctive stripe that is painted in obvious places along a hiking trail to let you know that you are on the right path. In Shenandoah National Park there tons of marked trails. There are blue blazes, red blazes and yellow blazes, but the white blaze is reserved for the granddaddy trail of them all, the AT which traverses completely through the park. …
…The sky over your head will be brass, and the earth beneath you iron. Deuteronomy 28:23 This past week I had coffee with Scott Heine, a pastor friend who has consistently reached out to me for years and especially since I stepped down from active pastoral ministry at the end of March. We met at Panera in Gainesville and I was about 1/2 way into my first mug of steaming joe when he stopped the chat and said, “So how…
For years people have been telling me that I ought to write a book. I don’t know if I have the patience and discipline for that… but I do like to write devotional material. For the past 10 years, I’ve been consistently writing and using the material for church newsletters, social media and sometimes just for fun. Now, the majority of it is compiled in one place. One day, I hope my kids will sift through all of this and…
On Wednesday, I returned from a 10 day expedition through Shenandoah National Park. God and I walked the Appalachian Trail from the park’s northernmost entrance in Front Royal to its southernmost point at Waynesboro. My 101 mile journey crossed 8 Virginia counties and traversed several dozen peaks with an elevation swing of 530 feet in Front Royal to a high of 4039 feet at Hawkbill mountain. This had been on my “bucket list” for a while, but the suddenness of…