community

The Light Still Comes

As I have walked with individuals and families along the journey of grief, one of the reflections I’ve heard again and again is their surprise that the day after a loss or tragedy, the light still comes in the morning. As we were walking yesterday, I felt the same surprise. How could the day look […]

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Puddle Walks

The past few days have provided the setting for our favorite kinds of walks: puddle walks. As we walk through the neighborhood, we try to ride through every single puddle. The cyclist goes first and we watch the water ripple before the stroller takes a turn. It’s little small things like this that draw us

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Yesterday’s Grinds

As I was making coffee, I went into autopilot and when the kettle went off, I didn’t even look into the french press to warm it up. As I was pouring the hot water into my mug before adding it back to the french press, I noticed that yesterday’s grinds were still in the bottom

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Peeling Pomegranates

It’s been years since I peeled a pomegranate. I usually take the easy way out and buy the seeds of pomegranates or even the juice, but yesterday I decided to buy a pomegranate to show our four and half-year-old and our twenty-month-old as we were talking about seeds and how things grow. Something happened as

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On Wandering

For the upcoming weeks, our community of faith will be wandering in the wilderness with the Israelites as we near Advent season. I am terrible with directions. So bad in fact that when I first started driving, I was instructed to check in when I left somewhere and when I arrived somewhere. Since I started

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200,000 deaths

This weekend, we reached another terrible threshold. The death toll in the United States has passed 200,000 people who have died from COVID-19. 200,000 families torn apart. 200,000 patients whom healthcare officials have tried to help. If you didn’t know that we had reached this monumental number, it’s because there is so much to distract

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On Being Curious

“Mama, do you have any questions for me?” Our four-year-old almost always starts his day with this question. He is so curious. He wants to know as much as he can about everything from the names and planets of Star War characters to how and why hurricanes form. He wants to learn every letter and

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On Loving Our Neighbor

This past week the lectionary came from Romans and it talked about loving our neighbor, a concept that we most often associate with the sayings of Jesus recorded in the gospel. What struck me about this instruction in Romans is that it comes after the reminder in Romans 12:1-2 to “offer our bodies as living

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On Grounding

In the midst of all the changes we are experiencing and the way our sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive, it can be very easy to disconnect from our bodies and our souls especially. When we are constantly reacting to decisions and news because we can’t think ahead, then we move into an automatic kind

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