Author: Gary Furr

I am a musician, writer and Christian minister living in Alabama. I am founder and President of the Alabama Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children.
Alabama, Americana, Folk, Kate Campbell, Songwriting

Lenten Speaker Series Continues: Kate Campbell

Gary Furr

Last evening, we kicked off our series, “The Callings That Find Us,” with Dr. Danny Potts.  An overflow crowd filled the room and was not disappointed as he shared his personal journey with brokenness and new life through his father’s long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.  It was inspiring and so helpful to all who were there. Next Wednesday we welcome folksinger Kate Campbell. Kate is a favorite singer-songwriter for many.  She is a storyteller and singer with a unique voice that blends faith, justice and humanity in her writing and singing.  Growing up in the south as the daughter of a … Continue reading Lenten Speaker Series Continues: Kate Campbell

death, Faith, Hope

Good Men and High Callings

Gary Furr

So much about bad things men do these days. But what about good men? Five years ago today my father-in-law, one of the best men who ever walked this earth, left it. He is surely playing the front nine in heaven if they have a course. From the obit I gave for him in 2014: The goal, the prize of the high calling, was never about piling up money for its own sake, but for being able to help others. In our early years, Forrest drove, excuse me, a crappy car. It was an old sky blue Ford that seemed … Continue reading Good Men and High Callings

Christianity, Hymns, Uncategorized3 Comments

Come, Ye Sleepers: A Hymn for Time Change Sunday

Gary Furr

It’s time change Sunday agaiu.  We “Spring Forward” (move clocks forward one hour) just as in the fall we “fall back,” as in move them back an hour. We spend an inordinate amount of time dreading, hating and complaining about the changes. It’s fairly well known that it messes up our sleep patterns, too. According to the website, LiveScience, it was Ben Franklin that first came up with the notion. The Germans were the first to do it, during the first World War. Woodrow Wilson and FDR also followed in wartime, to save fuel and economize. They also point out … Continue reading Come, Ye Sleepers: A Hymn for Time Change Sunday

hope2 Comments

Hope: Quotes Worth Having

Gary Furr

Frederick Buechener “Ministers and congregation both, they came to church year after year, and who is to say how if at all their lives were changed as the result? If you’d stopped and asked them on any given Sunday, I suspect they would have said they weren’t changed much.  Yet they kept on coming anyway; and beneath all the lesser reasons they had for doing so, so far beneath that they themselves were only half aware of it, I think there was a deep reason, and if I could give only one word to characterize that reason, the word I would give is … Continue reading Hope: Quotes Worth Having

Art, death, Family, Grief, hope, Tragedy

Between Cross and Easter

Gary Furr

Of late, not only in my ministry work, but through the connections of social media, I have been highly conscious of the processions of sorrow that go on around us in the midst of life. In my work, we are walking near every kind of brokenness and sorrow in the world every week, then trying hard to stand up and proclaim hope on Sunday.

Brokenness comes in so many different forms, but it all shares one truth–suddenly we are in a room with no walls to keep predators out, no roof to shield us from torrential storms, no floor to stop us from going down. WIth that comes temptation to panic, that we might absolutely burst from the heaviness of it all. It is here that faith matters most if it matters at all.

This prayer is from my 2015 book, Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises.  It was a prayer given originally as an invocation to a performance of the Requiem by John Rutter. If you are in that place, perhaps it would be of some encouragement today.

We came here tonight to wait and to hope

That tombs and sorrow and death and loss

Are only prelude

To seek the Living shepherd,

Beyond our doubts, beyond our fears,

From death into life.

We wait faithfully

Hoping that

You might meet us in our gardens of sorrow as you met Mary,

We wait for unexpected visions in the midst of our tears.

And for you to come to us

As you came to them behind the locked doors of fear

To wait tonight is enough

For tomorrow we will walk to the tomb again Continue reading “Between Cross and Easter”