I don’t really believe. Shadow thought. I don’t believe any of this. Maybe I’m still fifteen. Mom’s still alive and I haven’t even met Laura yet. Everything that’s happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our …
Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods fo credit card and freeways, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat …
When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt. I hope and I get discouraged. I love and I hate…to live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and …
I’ve honestly never thought about how significant this day can be for those who aren’t mothers until I had friends who started to share their journeys to try to be parents and how difficult they are and until I started reading and hearing stories like this one: Fast forward several years to Mother’s Day. A …
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship is a part of many preachers and ministers libraries as well as a part of seminary classes for students. When I encountered the Cost of Discipleship in my theological German class, I realized something immediately. When translated to English, the title and implications of the book changed. In German, Bonhoeffer’s …
I have been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World and she has a chapter about the spiritual practice of getting lost. I was confused at first and then so excited because I get lost all the time, which means I am super spiritual, right? No, that’s not what it means, but she explains …
In reading Madeline L’engle’s Walking on Water, I was impressed by her honesty: One of the things that I learned on the road back is that I do not have to be right. I have to try to do what is right, but when it turns out, as happens with all of us to be wrong, to …
Whether you are spending the last day of 2012 with friends or spending it trying to forget the pain and hurt that the year brought, there’s something remarkably important about stopping and looking back. There’s something about putting markers down to remember where we have been and to shape the next part of our journey …
Interestingly, there is a marketing background to the Christmas light tradition that drives us all to bundle in our cars and drive through neighborhoods and businesses. Thomas Edison is behind these twinkle lights and his need to share with the world the wonder of his electric lights drove him and his friend Edward Johnson …
Maybe it’s the things we struggle through the hardest, that shape and form us. Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating and even gruesome, may make …
