Good morning... Opening time and space in these first wee hours, I wait for God to whisper. Who knows what will bubble up and spill on my journal? As I wait, quietly attentive, I strangely feel drawn to doodle. I doodle my memory of 93-year-old Betty Skinner's room in her assisted living facility in Florida. I sketch her [...]
Good morning... What was my best birthday gift of 2019? All six of our family members coming into town to enjoy a Sunday brunch at West Egg on the westside. Our 24-year-old son brought back from his Campus Outreach beach trip one question that sparked an animated discussion: "When in your life have you been closest to dying?" [...]
Good morning... Life phases joined hands in the church hallway. A few weeks back, we hosted our United Methodist Women's Baby Celebration, a touching event honoring the babies born annually into our faith community. This was a particularly special celebration as five or six of the very active UMW members were new grandmothers at the gathering. These faithful [...]
Good morning... After journaling with God for a few early morning hours, I got up from our cozy couch to craft a new insight for our blog. Before writing to you, I opened the Henri Nouwen Society devotional thought for this day. What I planned to write was trumped by fresh wisdom being born. ****** DAILY MEDITATION | [...]
Good morning... Today Betty Skinner turns 93 years old. She wakes in Ponte Vedra, Florida. I wake in Atlanta, Georgia. We both wake increasingly more whole. In the fall of 2007, I met The Hidden Life Awakened in its original 2006 form, a captivating book chronicling the fascinating faith journey of Christian mystic Betty Skinner. For reasons way beyond [...]
Good morning... "A twenty-year old college student came to see me in a crisis," writes Sue Monk Kidd on page 27 in When The Heart Waits. "After years of denial, she was finally facing the realization that she had been sexually abused as a child. That realization had landed her in a lot of pain and confusion. She [...]
Good morning... Our family is short. You saw photos of my parents in a few recent posts, my parents who stand 5-feet-1 and 5-feet-3. My older sister and I stand up really tall to reach 5-feet ourselves, and our younger brother is the giant of our family at a whopping 5-feet-9. My husband is also 5-feet-9, and our [...]
Good morning... I recently happened upon a story about our family stepping out of our old life before stepping into our new one in autumn of 2003. ****** Conform Or Transform? by Sue Allen, on page 39 in Touching Truth: Grasping The Grace of God As our family moved from a sleepy lifestyle in rural Pennsylvania to the [...]
Good morning... "Jung divided life into two phases. The first phase, or 'morning,' is reserved for relating and orienting to the outer world by developing the ego," we read aloud as a class yesterday from page 9 of Sue Monk Kidd's When The Heart Waits. "The second half, or 'afternoon,' is for adapting to the inner world by [...]
Good morning... Remember? I shared with you that my parents, ages 80 and 81, moved away from our hometown of Berea, Ohio after living there for over fifty years. Following the lead of several good friends, on November 1st, 2018 they moved into a two-bedroom, two-bath villa in a continuing care, retirement community twenty minutes away. In early [...]
