by Guy Sayles | Aug 17, 2017 | Uncategorized
Both sides in Charlottesville last weekend were not the same. To claim, as the President of the United States did, that the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters, and ethno-nationalists—clad in body armor, carrying torches, wearing swastikas, bearing Confederate Battle...
by Guy Sayles | Aug 8, 2017 | Uncategorized
Last week, I took a few days to be alone, hike, read, and reflect. My heart had become a clamorous echo chamber; I needed quiet solitude and the sweet music of wind in the trees, water flowing and falling over rocks, the rumble of an occasional thunderstorm, and...
by Guy Sayles | Jul 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
Cancer has changed—is changing—me in, I imagine, the ways that a variety of life-limiting, life-diminishing, and life-threatening experiences change other people.When, 3½ years ago, my oncologist confirmed that I have Multiple Myeloma (MM), I began a relationship with...
by Guy Sayles | Jul 19, 2017 | Uncategorized
“Many people die with their music still in them.” I first heard that phrase more than forty years ago from one of my teachers. It registered with me as profoundly true. I haven’t always played my music.I’ve had stretches of time in which I played other...
by Guy Sayles | Jul 12, 2017 | Uncategorized
“I’m Guy, and I’m a workaholic.”That’s the way I’d introduce myself if there were a W.A. 12-Step Group (maybe there is!).I’ve written and talked about the amazing gift of Sabbath, about the importance of a sustaining rhythm of engagement and disengagement, about the...
by Guy Sayles | Jul 5, 2017 | Uncategorized
It’s well-known that President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk which read, “The Buck Stops Here.” It was the haberdasher from Missouri’s way to describe a crucial quality of all effective leaders: they shoulder, not shirk, their responsibilities.Leaders make tough...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
This post originally appeared on the Center for Healthy Churches website on June 27, 2017.Ministry happens in the meantime and in the mean time.The meantime is a season of sometimes bewildering change and troubling transitions. It’s an interval between a past we know...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 20, 2017 | Uncategorized
I rarely watch a movie a second time or tune-in to reruns of television shows, not even the ones I’ve really enjoyed or have made a significant impression on me. Exceptions have been: The Wizard of Oz, the first movie by which I was mesmerized into enchantment; It’s a...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 13, 2017 | Uncategorized
My mother was two months shy of her 80th birthday when she died last Wednesday. She lived almost exactly a decade longer than my father, though she was never quite the same after cancer and its complications claimed his life. She gradually faded into the fog of...
by Guy Sayles | Jun 4, 2017 | Uncategorized
It’s painful to face and hard to admit: by the time I was a young adult, fear and shame had formed a dark and dank swamp in my heart. The swamp was fed by slowly-moving streams of culture, family, and folk-religion, streams which carried commands, words, stories, and...
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