Mr. Locke’s Classroom

Amy and Ami were roommates in college. Ami was a bridesmaid at our wedding and vice-versa. Her husband, Jeff, is an IT guy who uses open-source software, is a beer enthusiast, plays guitar, loves folk music, and is down with the whole “emerging church” conversation. But we hit it off long before we each independently [...]

Today was day one of our one-way trip to a new life in New Jersey. The plan was to leave Frisco bright and early this morning, but as I explained numerous times today (in answer to the inevitable “You’re still here???”) for the Locke family, “bright and early” means any time before the sun sets. [...]

This Sunday I’ll be preaching my last sermon at Faithbridge Presbyterian church, strapping on my guitar to sing my last songs with the praise team, and saying my goodbyes to all the people who have been part of our lives for the past decade. Then Amy, Grady, Abby and I will climb into our incredibly [...]

You know you’re old when you have to borrow your three-year-old son’s laptop to blog. The keys are small, but it gets better wifi reception than my laptop would, plays mp3s better, runs linux, and he’s sleeping anyhow. We just arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma tonight, and we’re staying at the house of Grady J. Walker [...]

Congratulations to my sister, Emily Mae Locke, and her Fighter Pilot Top-Gun Guy Boyfriend (now fiance), Mark Jennings. By now, Em is probably somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on her way to the middle east, where she’ll be deployed for the next two months (over Christmas) flying a large gas-station for the US Air Force. [...]

The past four weeks have been pretty lousy. So yesterday didn’t make things any better. I got home from my trip to Pittsburgh, and Molly — my three-legged pet box turtle for the past twelve years — had escaped. Ever since we moved into our ground-level apartment, we sometimes take her out of her aquarium [...]

Yesterday I was having a Samson moment. Because of some stuff happening in my life right now, I was feeling shorn of power, shorn of favor, and shorn of identity. Like Samson, it was mostly a situation brought on by my own arrogance and/or stupidity, but also like Samson, there was a certain amount of [...]