by Guy Sayles | Oct 16, 2011 |
It has been odd but good: over the last month or so, when I have been jogging through town, people have spontaneously decided to join me. I’m still not sure why. Maybe it’s because I was moving so slowly, they liked the idea of winning an easy race. Or maybe I looked...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 9, 2011 |
Maybe you will find this hard to believe, but, from years and years of paying attention to the fears and hopes which people carry deep in their hearts, I know it to be true: More people than you might guess are sure that God is mostly unhappy with them, endlessly...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 22, 2011 |
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this question: In what way does Jesus inform, and perhaps transform, our understanding of leadership? As we answer that question, we need to resist the temptations to make him over in our image, domesticate him, and limit his...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 7, 2011 |
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it” (From Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sometimes”). I would only add: Love God. Love your neighbors. By so being and doing, you will also discover love for...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 6, 2011 |
Sometimes, the “right” thing—the thing we learned from custom, culture and tradition—conflicts with the loving thing, by which I mean, the “Jesus-thing.” Here’s what I keep learning: it isn’t loving, if it isn’t something we imagine Jesus would do or say, it isn’t...
by Guy Sayles | Sep 2, 2011 |
We’re all connected. That means you affect me, I affect you, we affect them, and they affect us. In fact, in the truest sense, there is no them—only us. Late in his remarkable novel, All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren offers this compelling metaphor of our...
by Guy Sayles | Aug 16, 2011 |
Saturday night, when my work on Sunday’s sermon stalled-out and my mind had gotten stale, I walked from my office over to the city park, found a place to sit in the grass, and soaked up the sights and sounds of “Shindig on the Green.” I was pretty far back from the...
by Guy Sayles | Aug 9, 2011 |
Canadian humorist and journalist Richard J. Needham once said: “People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.” By contrast, the Apostle Paul said: “Speak the truth in love. . . . Say only what builds...
by Guy Sayles | Aug 3, 2011 |
Artists of life and love need to practice. We learn by doing, hone our skills by repetition, and improve by training. Regular practice conditions us to become better—more competent and more effective—in the ways of authentic life and genuine love. In her book, Writing...
by Guy Sayles | Jul 29, 2011 |
James Hillman suggested it’s the vocation of grandparents to search “for grander possibilities” in children (The Force of Character, p. 188). What if we cultivated the practice, whatever our age, of imagining how a wise and tender grandparent would see and hear others...
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