by Guy Sayles | May 14, 2015 |
Early in my college years, I struggled to reclaim faith. At least that’s what the struggle seemed to be about as I was living through it. Looking back, it seems more likely that I was actually struggling for a way to let myself be reclaimed by a loving...
by Guy Sayles | May 7, 2015 |
In his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen wrote: “Every moment of each day I have the chance to choose between cynicism and joy. . . . Increasingly I discover that every choice for joy in turn reveals more joy and offers more reason to make life a true...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 29, 2015 |
Years ago, near President’s Day, some of the kids in our church’s Childhood Development Center made newsprint posters which bore the heading, “If I were president, I would. . . .” With the help of their teachers, the children imagined what they would do if...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 21, 2015 |
The Book of Common Prayer incudes a grateful and humble acknowledgment of “this fragile earth, our island home.” It’s a moving phrase; and, on this Earth Day, I pray that we will love this fragile earth with courageous and tender love, realizing that it’s not a...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 15, 2015 |
Have you tuned-in lately to the running play-by-play commentary on your life that is constantly blaring away in your heart and mind? 24/7/365, whether we’re conscious of it or not, harsh natter and chatter away with messages which belittle and berate us....
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...
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