Author Archives: DHawthorne

Getting It Right (Focus on Grace, January 2013)

Posted on May 25, 2014 by DHawthorne

Picture, if you will, a man. He is young, still somewhat idealistic, passionate and energetic. His friends, if asked to describe him with one word, would say things like, “faithful,” “devout,” and “intense,” and they would mean those things in … Continue reading →

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Experiencing Church (Focus on Grace, November 2012)

Posted on May 18, 2014 by DHawthorne

Author’s Note: this article was written more than a year and a half prior to my last post, “Playing Church,” but looks at the same issue through a slightly different lens. I actually hadn’t realized I was picking up on … Continue reading →

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Playing Church

Posted on May 11, 2014 by DHawthorne

When I was a teenager, I attended a church that seemed, to my youthful perceptions, to have a core group of people that never changed. Members outside this group came and went, but this core group always seemed to stay … Continue reading →

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What Is Your Opinion Worth? (Focus on Grace, October 2012)

Posted on May 4, 2014 by DHawthorne

I’ve always been somewhat baffled by protests. I don’t mean the earnest, sometimes violent, types of protests, like I grew up with in the sixties, or the kinds that have been storming the Arab world this past year. Those kinds … Continue reading →

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Taking a Wider View (Focus On Grace, September 2012)

Posted on April 27, 2014 by DHawthorne

I had a physics teacher when I was in high school who had a reputation for being brilliant. He held patents for manufacturing some of the first solid-state electronic components (selenium rectifiers), and he worked on the Manhattan Project when … Continue reading →

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The Law of Love (Focus on Grace, August 2012)

Posted on April 20, 2014 by DHawthorne

People love laws. I can almost hear the protests from here … examples of the many, many rule-breakers, rebels, and otherwise lawless types; everyone has a story, an example of just how wrong that opening statement is. Let me tell … Continue reading →

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Color Blind (Focus On Grace, July, 2012)

Posted on April 13, 2014 by DHawthorne

I had a helper at work some years ago who was color blind. He couldn’t tell the difference between red and green; the only way he knew whether to stop or go at a traffic light was by whether the … Continue reading →

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Accepting God’s Will (Focus on Grace, December 2011)

Posted on March 30, 2014 by DHawthorne

Every Christian agrees that it’s important to do God’s will. As the old hymn says, “trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus …” But that only covers the things we choose to do either … Continue reading →

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Paradigm Shift

Posted on March 4, 2014 by DHawthorne

I started this blog years ago for two reasons: to teaching myself how to install, set up and customize blogs on my web site, and to provide a place to practice writing. I never advertised it much, except for the … Continue reading →

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The Death of Democracy

Posted on August 20, 2013 by DHawthorne

A remarkable thing has happened … for the first time in over 35 years, former president Jimmy Carter has said something I agree with. In a speech at the meeting of “The Atlantic Bridge” in Atlanta, Georgia, he said, “America … Continue reading →

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