Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Since 2007

Tag: Christianity

  • Separated

    I first shared this in 2008. It describes a scene from my childhood, of me walking up the hill my family lived on during a very bad storm. Thanks to the family I mention in the story, I now have a 1972 photograph of that scene in fairer weather. It was taken from that family’s…

  • Forgiveness isn’t reconciliation

    It makes me crazy when I hear it said (especially by preachers or others teaching the Christian faith) that when you forgive someone, you must reconcile, returning the relationship to where it was before. It’s not true. In my last post I wrote about why and how to forgive – to suffer the loss and bear…

  • The mechanics of forgiveness

    $400 bought my resentment and scorn. When I was in college, one of my roommates had a girlfriend who still lived in his hometown. He missed her a lot, and spent a couple hours on the phone with her every night. One day he abruptly quit school and moved back home to be with her.…

  • The old songs

    On this Good Friday, I’d like to repost a story from a few years ago. I’m now a member of the little church in this story, and we will observe this Good Friday just as described here. I went to an evening church service last Friday, Good Friday. I’d never done that before. My Christian…

  • This cup is already broken

    I first published this in 2010 but have been thinking of it recently as I’ve been upgrading some furnishings in my home. This was my favorite mug. A long time ago I worked in a museum’s gift shop. We sold works of local artists and for several weeks featured a talented potter. I was taken…

  • The urban mission

    For Easter in 1914, a photographer made this panoramic image of the congregation at West Park Christian Church in Indianapolis. On Sunday, armed with my new iPhone that automatically takes panoramic shots, I tried to reproduce the scene. (Click either photo to see it larger.) Much has changed at West Park Christian Church in 98…

  • Find joy where life is

    It’s Down the Road’s fifth blogiversary! All month I’m reposting favorite stories from the blog’s early days. It was my third annual trip to the Vida Nueva mission in Piedras Negras, Mexico. The day after I returned from my first mission trip to Mexico, my wife and I separated. By the second trip, she had filed…

  • Holding up my hand

    Following up on Monday’s post about my search for a new church, I want to reprint this post, which explains how I learned not to look to the church, but to God himself, for my faith. It’s long, but I think worth the time. On my first day of Kindergarten, my mother walked with me…

  • Searching for fellowship

    It’s been four months since my sons and I left North Liberty Christian Church to find a new place to be a part of the Christian family. I haven’t been enjoying the process. I’m introverted, and meeting lots of new people drains me. I have to admit, a couple Sundays when my sons were with…

  • Moving on is a simple thing; what it leaves behind is hard

    When I measure the health of North Liberty Christian Church in terms of key external indicators, things don’t look good. I’ve been writing about this church’s challenges for two years now, chronicling its story of a dying congregation, of leaving the land it called home for 170 years, of delays and cost overruns in building…

  • The opposite of love

    When I was young, I thought the opposite of love must be hate. This seemed obvious to my forming mind – love is a strong emotion at one pole, and hate is an equally strong emotion at the other. But as I grew up, I started to see that the fires of love and hate…

  • In God’s house

    North Liberty Christian Church and Bethel United Methodist Church have been neighbors for a very long time. For more than 150 years, the two churches stood about three quarters of a mile apart on the same road in Pike Township, Marion County, Indiana. Check out this section of an 1855 plat map that shows both…