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Instructions for Living a Life

“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...

What I Keep Learning

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...

We’re All Connected

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...

The Church and Shindig on the Green

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...

Truth for Love’s Sake

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...

Practice

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...