Serve by Design

We are on grand kids' care duty these days while the parents are away on school business. One of our favorite outdoor activities during the summer is to patrol the neighborhood hot-spots with bicycles, scooters and for the littlest guy, on a hot wheels trike! We start out at a nearby church to cruise on the spacious paved parking lot. Then,  we walk down to a little watershed branch that runs between the church and several houses on our street only to find that it that was dry this mid-July morning, but we still threw our sticks into the crusty dirt trough where water once shed from the farm field across the way. After this first phase of our "ritual ride," we like to move into the retirement  apartments next door to the church and to the center courtyard where an American flag flies proudly above its pole and flower-adorned base. It is here that we have recited the Pledge of Allegiance every time we have gathered in this place.This has been our patriotic practice since...

This week is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. It has been awe-inspiring to see video clips replayed of the moonshot during the morning and evening newscasts. On Wednesday, July 16, 1969, at 10: 32 AM (CST) the Apollo 11 space capsule, with its crew of three (Astronauts Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong), was launched atop the huge Saturn V rocket on Pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. With 7.5 million pounds of thrust, it was sent into its journey 238,900 miles to the surface of the moon. It would take four days to arrive. At precisely 8:56 PM on Sunday night, July 20th, Neil Armstrong made the first human footprint on the lunar surface with the exclamation: "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind!" And history was made! In total, 6 similar missions to the moon's surface would follow over a 41 month time span between July 1969 and December 1972. This epic and herculean feat has not been matched since that tim...