Life Expectancies

“I wish I’d been born in the 19th century,” I told my father one day in my far-past adolescence. “It is my favorite time in history.” In my teenaged mind, the 19th century in the United States elicited thoughts of romance and realism, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and...

Suffering Well

As a child, sometimes I wished that God would send me a lifetime of suffering all at once, a few seconds of horrible pain, and then I’d be happy for the rest of my life. That amount of pain would probably have killed me. And had I survived, I probably would not have...