(a Steve Orr Bible Reflection for Epiphany) This year, the Eleventh Day of Christmas falls on Sunday, January 4th. At our church, it’s going to share the day with Epiphany Sunday. Can you imagine it? Those eleven pipers piping as they march down the aisle of the church? That’s probably not happening. But we need to pour that kind of excitement into our Epiphany Sunday. Christmas celebrates the day Jesus came to the people of Israel. Epiphany (sometimes called Three Kin

My Waco family taught me (or at least tried to) a new game over Thanksgiving called “Poetry for Neanderthals”. It is advertised as “a fun word game with the typical humor of Exploding Kittens.” I didn’t like the idea of kittens being blown up, but I was taking the phrase much too literally. I learned that Exploding Kittens is “a kitty-powered card game […] that functions like a version of Russian Roulette, where the goal is to avoid drawing an Exploding Kitten card.” It sound

It is helpful for me to reflect on what I (hope) I have learned during our “missionary” career. Some thoughts (even if trivial) may also be helpful to others: Remember that God does not provide a plan or a script for you to read: for us, it was a good thing because we might have been frightened to go forward Unexpected events are part of His plan and should not be rejected: it is hard to accept and not react negatively when “our” plans change Be aware and accept the people an

(a Steve Orr Bible reflection) The FBI did not like It’s A Wonderful Life. Perhaps you are not so much shocked that someone didn’t like the film—after all, opinions differ—but that the FBI had any kind of opinion about the film. I think many of us, especially George Bailey fans, are scratching our heads. How could they not like It’s A Wonderful Life ? The answer: The FBI felt Mr. Potter was not portrayed realistically in the film. After all, they reasoned, he was jus

(a Steve Orr Bible reflection for Advent) It was a Christmas we would never forget. I was no older than the first grade. The most enduring memory of that Christmas season is one downtown shopping night. My hometown is located at the confluence of two rivers: the Ohio and the Tennessee. In winter, they make the downtown crosswinds positively icy. The coldest corner was Fourth and Broadway, the location of the Paducah Dry Goods (a twin of the Higbee’s department store in A

In 1990, we thought we had left PNG permanently, but God had plans for us to return, so during several months from 2002-2004 we went back to help with the revision of the West Kewa NT and the translation of the East Kewa NT. God brings things into our lives that can completely change our directions. It happened this way: Joice and I were working at the Wicliffe and SIL center at Dallas and we were quite happy in our jobs. However, in about the year 2000 a package arrived and

(a Steve Orr Advent reflection) The full moon was the brightest light in a cloudless sky. Countless stars glittered around it, gilding the winter night all the way down to the mountaintops. We could hear the swish of the sleigh’s runners through the powdery snow and the faint rhythmic jingle of bells on the horse’s collar. We were actually “dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.” It’s one of the main reasons we chose Franconia, New Hampshire, for our winter

By 1965 we had two children, with Karol only 3 months old. We went to NZ to start the first summer school of SIL in that country and Joice carried Karol to her teaching classes in a large woven New Guinea basket. We had some amazing things happen and we needed them because we knew nothing about starting a school. One example happened quite unexpectedly, like such things do, and I referred to it in an earlier essay. A professor of linguistics from the University of Michigan a

(a Steve Orr Bible Reflection for Advent) In the Charles Yu short story collection, Third Class Superhero , Nathan lives in a world full of super-powered beings. But Nathan is not good enough to be one of them. Oh, he has a power—of sorts. But it’s too meager to qualify for full-time heroics. So, instead of zooming to the rescue of someone in desperate need of saving, he works a thankless job that barely covers room and board. What’s a third-class superhero to do? I know

I have taken you, the reader, through 23 chapters of “On Missionaries: A Personal View,” many of them dealing with Joice’s experience with cancer. I started the series by reflecting on how I “became” a missionary, not called in the sense of St. Paul or most of the great missionaries, but somehow convinced that I should “become” one. I really had no idea what that would mean. I was a 17-year-old senior in High School, about to go to college, which I thought would prepare me