On my dad’s winter visits to our Mexican home, he customarily brought with him Christmas gifts. Sometimes, he would bring a single toy for three of us to share, like a tricycle he brought one year. Once, he brought a pair of roller skates. He gave one to my younger brother, Gustavo (we started calling …
By Rick Manzanares © Copyright (Rick Manzanares is my good friend, an IT Leader/Senior Business Analyst at Hewlett-Packard, a former police officer, born-again Christian, and a solid father and husband. It was not always this way for Rick, however. This month’s guest post, El Cholo offers some unique insights from Rick’s past, “before Christ.”) We robbed the …
By Rick Manzanares © Copyright (Rick Manzanares is my good friend, an IT Leader/Senior Business Analyst at Hewlett-Packard, a former police officer, born-again Christian, and a solid father and husband. It was not always this way for Rick, however. This month’s guest post, El Cholo offers some unique insights from Rick’s past, “before Christ.”) Life drastically twisted …
The Lord showered me with gifts, abilities, and opportunities. Instead of learning to know Him, I spent countless hours pursuing selfish interests, succeeding in my career while ignoring God. I spent 19 school years to earn a law degree and become a lawyer. I spent 7-8 years training to earn a black belt in the …
Months after I surrendered my life to Christ, my sisters started attending a Christian church in Lompoc, California, partly motivated to seek whatever caused such a transformation in my life. A few months later, each accepted Christ as her Lord and Savior, which generated increasing dialogue with me about the changes they were experiencing. …
Hello friends and family! At the bottom of this post are the winners of the “Most Overused Cliché Contest,” Round 1, as determined by my Facebook friends’ entries. I posted the top three because, surprisingly, there was little repetition. So, many would be tied for fourth and fifth place, if I posted them all. Two …
Even the humblest dwellings conceal hazards the wary fail to anticipate. But nothing escapes God’s vigil. My earliest childhood home, a one-bedroom house, lacked piped-in gas. To provide gas for cooking and water-heating, a local gas company periodically delivered a pair of compressed gas cylinders. Each cylinder stood about four feet high, and was made …
Years ago, as I walked down a wide hallway at my old church, a tall, white-haired, blue-eyed man with a glowing complexion and an imposing presence walked toward me intently. He could easily pass for a younger brother of Peter Graves (Mission Impossible TV series?). I knew him as Robert Rose, a respected elder who …
I was born in the 1950’s, in a relative’s home in a city located in the mountains of central Mexico. Although my birth-city (Uruapan, Michoacán) is known as “The avocado capital of the world,” I remember it more for its lush vegetation, El Parque Nacional (National Park), with running streams of cold, pure water, and …
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