by Guy Sayles | May 18, 2009 |
As you know, the Chinese language is comprised of pictographs; and, according to Wayne Muller, the symbol for busy is composed of two characters, heart and killing (Sabbath, p. 3). Too much busyness for too long is deadly, because it starves, stresses, and, finally,...
by Guy Sayles | May 12, 2009 |
As you probably know, the great American writer, Carl Sandburg, spent the last years of his life on a lovely farm not far from Asheville. A television interviewer once asked this fine writer, “What, in your opinion, is the ugliest word in the English language?”...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 28, 2009 |
Sometimes, when I am hitting a string of lousy shots in racquetball—skipping them to the floor or hitting them so high on the wall that even my opponents who are just as middle-aged as I am can easily return them—I will throw my hand up in the air, call a time-out,...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 15, 2009 |
One of my favorite William Stafford poems is “The Little Ways that Encourage Good Fortune.” It concerns wisdom, which Stafford describes as “having things right in your life and knowing why.”Wisdom is having things right in your life and...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 11, 2009 |
Some reflections I shared at our Good Friday service today:On this Good Friday, I simply want to tell you the man on the cross is to me. And, as I have before, I borrow a phrase from an Anglican bishop [John A. T. Robinson] to tell you that, for me, Jesus is the human...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 2, 2009 |
Farmer-writer Wendell Berry is a guide to me, as to so many others. Several years ago, writing about learning to see, and so to care for, his Kentucky farm, Berry gave me new ways of thinking about “place” and “community” (church):One’s work...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 27, 2009 |
In 1998, when The Truman Show was making its way into theaters, Newsweek magazine interviewed the movie’s star, Jim Carey. Among other things Carey talked about, he admitted to a great deal of curiosity about God: “What is up there? What’s God? I’ve spent my whole...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 23, 2009 |
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls us away from our desperate drive for security into a confident dependence on God:Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 18, 2009 |
I have been thinking lately about how change and growth happen in us. It seems to me that the most far-reaching spiritual shifts and emotional realignments we experience take a long time. They might begin in an instant of inspiration or be initiated by the occurrence...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 5, 2009 |
I think of Lent as a season in the wilderness, and I don’t think of the wilderness as, necessarily, a “bad” place to be. The Bible views the wilderness, as it views so many other things, paradoxically. On the one hand, a wilderness is an abandoned or...
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