by Stacey Denny | Apr 25, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was visiting with a friend this past week and we got to talking about the worst jobs we’d ever had. Mine was my first job out of high school, when for five years I operated a rattling, banging, prone-to-malfunctioning machine that scanned utility bills. Every day...
by Stacey Denny | Apr 15, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
This is my 25th Palm Sunday here at Fairfield. This past week, I read through all 25 Palm Sunday sermons I’d given, and I noticed I was giving essentially the same sermon every Palm Sunday–the modesty and humility of Jesus riding a donkey stands in contrast to...
by Stacey Denny | Apr 15, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
Welcome, friends. It is, as always, a delight to be with you in this pleasant place. It was Winston Churchill who famously said, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” I was having lunch with a friend this past week who asked me what I would have done if...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 25, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
It is good to be home. I was in North Carolina last weekend, officiating at the wedding of my niece, Lauren, the daughter of my oldest brother Glenn, who is as white as white can be. Here’s how white my brother is. When he retired two years ago, he bought a pick-up...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 25, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
A year after I was born, my father was hired by Johnson Wax as a salesman, visiting grocery stores across Indiana, peddling his wares, mostly Raid bug spray and Pledge furniture polish. Then in 1970, the shaving cream world was rocked when Johnson Wax invented Edge...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 6, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
Last week, we began thinking about the things that give us hope in these challenging days, because it is far too easy to feel hopeless, so we need to think intentionally about the developments that give us hope, and I said one thing that gave me hope were the...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 6, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was thinking this week of Mr. Hoban, an elderly neighbor of ours when I was growing up on Broadway Street, there in Danville. He was a veteran of two wars—World War I and World War II. He was so gentle and kind, his activity as a soldier seemed incongruent with the...
by Stacey Denny | Mar 6, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I learned this week that a kid I knew growing up had passed away. This seems to be happening with more frequency, and I am usually saddened by the development, but this time I had mixed feelings. I met him when I was ten years old, and my family moved across town to a...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 22, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was up at Life’s Journey this week visiting Stacey Denny’s mother, who’s in hospice there. They have a bookshelf in the lobby filled with religious books, including a book called Heaven, written by a man named Randy Alcorn, whom I met 30 years ago when I started...
by Stacey Denny | Jan 20, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I’ve been thinking this week of my Baptist grandmother, who took it upon herself to make us fit for civilization. Fortunately, I didn’t see her often. When my father and mother were first married, they moved 120 miles away from her, to give themselves a little...
