Papa Pat Tiny Devotionals

Greetings and blessings, internet friends and neighbors, plus those precious relatives who are taking the time away from intense life-dealing in order to find some diversion. Today is the day western Christianity observes Good Friday. (It's a week later in the Orthodox traditions.) Historically, it's been a time of reflection and meditation. I think my meditation started with sunflowers. A sunflower. My gift-from-God, happily-ever-after trophy wife Vanessa, the elegant, foxy, praying black grandmother of Woodstock, GA, decided to do some yard planting in a small way this year. In addition to the tomato plants in big pots on the back porch, she put some other items out. One of those was sunflowers. Coming home from church last Sunday, she remarked that her sunflowers didn't seem to be growing. I nodded my head, having fearlessly restrained myself from ANY involvement whatsoever* in her gardening frenzy, and did not wish to have that fact drawn to her attention. *That's n...

Greetings, Friends and Neighbors and Family out there in Internet Land! In the natural course of things, we all encounter pain. Physical pain is something I am familiar with, but it deserves its' own separate post, if not a SERIES of posts. This post is about the mental/emotional/spiritual pain that we experience, and it's just as inevitable as the physical kind. Whether it's a result of Happenings, or neuro-chemistry gone bad, we all have to deal with it somehow, or we withdraw from others and die inside. One guy decided to deal with it by going fishing. John 21:3  Simon Peter said, “I’m going fishing.” Jesus meets with Peter, John, & company on the shore, in the same way that He had met them when He first called them. Up to this point, Peter hadn't seen Jesus after the Resurrection, and he was discouraged. So he goes back to doing what he knew how to do, before Jesus had called him: fishing. Consider: He's riding on top, one of Jesus' closest friends, then...