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The Infallible Sign of Joy

Joy can be a trembling wonder. It’s like the trembling of a dog who wags his tail so hard that his whole body shakes when you come into the door at the end of a long day. It’s like the little girl who quivers with excitement on Christmas Eve.  The days and weeks...

Real Friends

Good friends give us the freedom to be who we are and to become our best selves. They help to disentangle us from ways of thinking and feeling which hinder us from reaching our full potential. They encourage us to break away from expectations and demands which chain...

Gonna Serve Somebody

We live in a crowded and busy marketplace of competing faiths, dueling deities, and rival worldviews, which means that we have to choose, deliberately and intentionally, which god we’re going to serve and which way through life we’re going to travel.  Bob Dylan...

Parade of Joy

Years ago, I preached a sermon I still regret: a rambling, ill-focused, and sneering screed of a Palm Sunday sermon in which I took cheap potshots at parades. I talked about out-of-tune bands, out-of-sync drill teams, and out-of-shape military veterans crammed into...

Awake to Life

The narrator of one of Alice Munro’s short stories described a middle aged woman this way: “Here she sat and saw her day as hurdles got through.  Not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well, good, now that’s over, that’s over.  What was she...

Prayers from the River and Waterfall

In her memoir, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day said: “Joy and sorrow, life and death, always so close together!”  My experience mirrors hers. I remember the first time Amanda performed in a little preschool choir—how happy I was to watch her stand with her...