by Stacey Denny | Oct 17, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
When I was nine-years-old, my parents moved to a stately old house on the south side of Danville, which is how I acquired my southern accent. The house had been built in 1913 for a Quaker minister and had a double parlor where Quaker weddings were held. When I was...
by Stacey Denny | Aug 13, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
When we had our house renovated twenty years ago, I had bookshelves built in my office, which are now stacked with books in haphazard piles. They were once arranged by topic, but now they’re arranged by convenience, the books I never read toward the back, and the ones...
by Stacey Denny | Aug 13, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I was up on the ladder last month cleaning our gutters and noticed our 30-year roof that was installed 18 years ago already needs replaced. The month before I had replaced our 80,000-mile tires after 49,000 miles, and just before that I replaced a half dozen LED light...
by Stacey Denny | Aug 12, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
I had a neighbor growing up whose name was Roger. We were the same age, maybe 7 or 8, and we shared a sandbox, a sort of communal sandbox, which we shared with several neighborhood cats. Every morning we’d clean it out, then play cars, building highways, tunnels, and...
by Stacey Denny | Jul 19, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
For years, I preached stand-alone sermons, but after a while noticed I was whaling away at the same subject every Sunday, so began doing series preaching, carefully selecting varied themes so as not to repeat myself. But the weakness of series preaching is the...
by Stacey Denny | Jun 24, 2025 | Plain Speech Messages
An old friend came to visit last week. We were sitting outside in our screenhouse, and the subject of money came up. My friend said, “I love money,” and I immediately thought of the comedian Steve Martin, who said, “I love money. I love everything about it. I bought...
