Living While Dying

Ten years ago this month, I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, an incurable but increasingly manageable cancer of the bone marrow and blood. At diagnosis, the median survival rate was about five years, so I’ve lived far longer than I then had reason to think I...

Do You See What I See?

A week ago, I stood near a Christmas tree in a sanctuary.  We sang “Away in a Manger.” I had a lot on my mind, and I was also dealing with a good bit of pain. I sang without noticing what I was singing until I heard the others in the room and, in a slightly...

A (Kind of) Liminal Week

By a quirk and gift of the calendar, this year is one of those comparatively rare ones in which there is a week in-between the Sunday after Thanksgiving and the First Sunday of Advent. That extra week doesn’t eliminate but it does temper just a bit the scrambling...

Grateful for a God Who is Joyful Love

Among the many gifts for which I am grateful this Thanksgiving season is the simple, lifesaving, and life-changing truth that God really is love. I have known that glad affirmation from childhood on but integrating it into my heart and experiencing its power to heal...

The Tug of the Invisible

When Amanda and Eliot were young, we’d often fly a kite on Easter afternoon. After lunch, I’d feel groggy from the busy and glad morning of worship leadership, but the kids would be amped-up on chocolate bunnies, peanut-butter cup eggs, and jelly- beans. I’d want to...

Gentle

Photo by Reign Abarintos on Unsplash Recently, when quiet enough to listen, I’ve heard whispered the word gentle. The whispers have become a beckoning to explore how to be gentler in my relationships with creation, others, and myself. Gentle has a checkered history in...

On Not Losing Heart

It had been one of “those” Sundays: the sermon misfired, the choir was off-key, the chair of deacons mentioned a member who complained she didn’t get a visit when she was in the hospital, someone slipped a critical anonymous note under the office door, and the roof...

I don’t get it

I’m a flawed follower of Jesus. I’m aware of gaps between what he teaches and how I live. There’s distance between his vision of the world as God means it to be and the world that my ego insists upon. In other words, I’m a sinner. To paraphrase the confession I pray...

Dark Night

(photo: pixbay) This post comes from journal reflections. While I’m reluctant to share them, I do so with the hope that they can help others. “I pray and incur  silence” (poet R. S. Thomas, “The Presence”). For more than a year, until very recently, God has been...

Lost and Found

Source: Unsplash A few weeks ago, hiking late in the day near Hot Springs, I got lost–not just temporarily detoured, utterly and completely lost. I was alone and hadn’t told anyone of my plans. I was in an area I know well, so I didn’t take a trail map or...