by Guy Sayles | Apr 5, 2015 |
Across my years as a pastor, I learned that people didn’t like it when I talked about death. So, fair warning: though this post is actually about joy, it’s about the kind of joy that finds us in life’s hard experiences, including death. Early in Holy Week,...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 16, 2015 |
I recently spent a couple of hours at the DMV; it was time to renew my driver’s license. The place was crowded with, in the words of the old Prayerbook, “all sorts and conditions” of people. It was a multiracial and multigenerational melting pot....
by Guy Sayles | Mar 9, 2015 |
”My heart isn’t in it any more.” When we feel that way, we’re in good company. Twice in 2 Corinthians 4, early and late in his reflections on the relationship of our humanity and the good news of Jesus, Paul claimed: “We do not lose...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 3, 2015 |
Over the last few years, through some hard and holy experiences, I have heard rising in my mind a few summaries of wisdom, summaries which crystallized discoveries I had made but did not know quite how to phrase. Compressed into them is a tangle of emotions: struggle...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 22, 2015 |
At Promise Academy, a school for at-risk students in the Harlem Children’s Zone, teacher Sophie Richard tutored a child to prepare him for a crucial test. One afternoon, when the young boy was tired and frustrated, she tried to offer him words of encouragement, but he...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 11, 2015 |
Dr. Seuss said that “Adults are obsolete children.” Many of us fear that obsolescence. We don’t want to be unrelentingly grim and somber and to shoulder so much “grown up” responsibility that it breaks our backs and our spirits. We want to keep or,...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 27, 2015 |
In his autobiographical essay, “The Crack Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And, physicist Niels Bohr once said: “A...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 18, 2015 |
Today is poet William Stafford’s birthday. In “The Way It Is,” William Stafford says: There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 13, 2015 |
I’m thankful for some essential truths I learned as a child in Sunday School at the First Baptist Church of Conley, GA, truths so profound that they still challenge and guide me. They came in two songs:...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 11, 2015 |
Across nearly 38 years of ministry, I have never seen, both inside and outside the church, more restless seeking than I see just now. People are on a quest for something, for someone, higher, holier and more beautiful than they have yet encountered. ...
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