Barbara L. Ayers -- Author

When I was a little girl, I loved playing with my brother’s cars and trucks. I would build roads and towns in the front driveway. When my best friend and I would put on plays for the neighborhood, I was ok with playing the male roles because my mother always styled my hair into a pixie-cut. But what I really enjoyed the most was putting on dress-up clothes and playing house with my dolls. In reality, I did as all children do--I played with whatever I had available. I learned the roles and moral compasses of my family members and our community by watching what they said and did. I assimilated what I saw into my own character formation. I developed who I was to become in society from the people in my life. This did not happen overnight. There were often bumps in the road. It took time and patience. More importantly, it took a natural physical development to be capable of any decision-making.    Children have a limited range of knowledge from which to draw conclusions. They d...

Many years ago I read a book from my grandmother’s library on the great earthquake that devastated San Francisco in 1906. I was not only horror-stricken but fascinated at the same time. As typical of most people, I looked to discover how people could survive such an experience. The buildings that remained standing after the earthquake had been built upon a foundation of rock. The ones that collapsed had been built upon sand. Additionally, those built upon rock had to further withstand the fires that erupted soon after. I am reminded of the biblical scripture that describes to us the importance of building a foundation upon solid rock. The security and soundness of constructing any structure or even our character using this directive is made clear. Our own experiences reinforce this edict. “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.   And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat...

My mother had been a member of two bridge groups for over thirty-five years. They got together every week for laughter and fellowship. Oh how much my mother loved to play bridge. She wore out cards so fast! Every year for Christmas I would place a new deck into her stocking. Shopping for that perfect deck of cards was not easy, but could be quite interesting. Mother was a history student throughout her life, so finding just the right picture or motif on them was important to me. Equally fun was to find that one deck having unique characters representing the face cards. Did you know that those face cards were originally designed to represent actual kings and queens—royalty from actual history? When I think about such a representation of reality, I drift off into thoughts of how a deck of cards is a lot like a person. The outside picture doesn’t tell us much about the actual person. We have to turn the deck over and look inside at the individual cards and what is represented therein....