Picturepocket's Blog

Tag: history

  • The Ones that Count

    Throughout history there is a divide between the named and the numbered—the people publicly acknowledged and remembered by name, and the faceless masses of women and workers that do a lot of the effort, but are willfully ignored. We see evidence of this all around us. There are streets and schools in nearly every American…

  • Swampland

    The land behind my home growing up was an old building site. It had bad drainage and had been abandoned. It was our playground the place that I return to in my dreams.  Every dark winter the uneven ground would fill up with water, all dank and boggy with brown skeletons of broken reeds and…

  • High School History

    Last weekend, while my oldest was at camp, Tim and I left our youngest with grandma and took off back to my hometown to go to my 30-year high school reunion. It was my first time back to the building since the nineteen-nineties. Our first activity, was to tour the old high school building. From…

  • Silence

    I just watched the 2016 Scorsese film about the persecuted church of Japan in the 17th century. Historically, the number of Christians in Japan fell through direct, intensive violence. Many of the conversions had come through Portuguese Catholic missionaries who not only brought faith, but also emphasized Western practices, traditions and language that threatened the…

  • YOLO

    I am laying here in bed trying to sort out some decisions that have come up. In life, there’s mostly a lot of mundane choices, but sometimes there are brief windows of opportunity. The phrase “you only live once” flits through my mind. I think that term was trending a decade ago. This time ten…

  • Cubits & Curiosity

    I was thinking about my Dad recently and his impact in the world. While he never built anything large, nor entertained a wide audience, after his death, for years, I would run into people whose lives he had crossed and created a meaningful connection. One of his talents was listening, not necessarily for relational purpose,…

  • Tough Times & Choices

    The movie that I ended up seeing back-to-back with Oppenheimer, was not the Barbie movie, but the 1975 film The Hiding Place. If you aren’t familiar, the story is about a Dutch watchmaker and her family that hide Jews during the German occupation. (There are some free streaming services that have it.) Both films are…

  • How to make Sense of the Bible

    Every year, there’s a bunch of folks who set out to read the Bible cover-to-cover in a year, but often don’t make it. They start out in Genesis, and get through creation and the flood. It’s rough, but kind of interesting. Exodus is exciting with Moses and his miracles, but then they hit Leviticus. Ugh,…

  • Entitled

    With the recent passing of one of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe, people around the world are sharing their condolences with our British friends. Now that that’s over, I would like to remind everyone of the horrible religious, political and economic systems the monarchy represents. Even though the English crown was downgraded to a…

  • A Blank Sheet

    Since you asked…