why bad things happen

June 10, 2024

Have you eaten from the tree?

Picture the parent, arms akimbo, confronting the young child. “Have you been eating chocolate?” The child, face covered with chocolate and a “Who, me?” expression, answers, “No, not me!” Now intensify that scene several hundred times, and imagine God calling to Adam in the garden, “Where are you?” and Adam, knowing he’d been caught, trying Continue reading

Ruminations

Adam’s guilt, disobedience, expulsion from paradise, garden of Eden, good and bad, good and evil, hardship, if your eye is healthy, if your eye is single, integrity, light and dark, suffering, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, why bad things happen
July 23, 2023

The pace of nature

What do you do when you’re unable to make sense of life – when its pieces lie before you like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no box-top picture to help you assemble them? Are there pieces, you may wonder, that were never meant to be part of the picture you’re working on? Is there Continue reading

Ruminations

Arlen Jenkins, God’s judgment, good and bad, good and evil, light and dark, Neil Kattermann, patience, puzzles, Ralph Waldo Emerson, redemption, theodicy, vacation, weeds and wheat, why bad things happen, why?
May 22, 2022

First the silence

“For everything there is a season,” the Teacher wrote, “and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Eccles. 3:1, 7b). Following the murders at Tops Market last Saturday, it still feels to me like a time to keep silence – a time to “‘be still, Continue reading

Ruminations

a time to keep silence, advice for children, after religion, Antaeus, carpe diem, Elijah, Fred Rogers, God in community, God works for good, God's purpose, God’s temple, God’s will, Hercules, How Firm a Foundation, listening to God, look for the helpers, memento mori, mystery, New Jerusalem, number our days, perspective on life, seize the day, shooting at Tops Market, silence, tempus fugit, the shortness of life, why bad things happen, William Alexander Percy

About Me

Rich Neal is, in no particular order, a wordsmith and graphic designer; lover of typography, books, and publishing; photographer; contemplative; saunterer; and a retired and still-active pastor. He claims neither special wisdom nor particularly deep insight into life, only occasional glimpses of what lies behind the veil along the way. He shares them here in the hope of connecting the pieces of life’s puzzle that come to him in the journey and would consider it a gift if sharing them also connected him with others who travel an unmarked path toward the same unknown end.

why bad things happen

Have you eaten from the tree?

The pace of nature

First the silence