Good morning... "Sue - your tears messages resound with me," writes another subscriber. "I am still the primary caregiver for my 93 year old mother. She has regressed terribly fast. I have quit my part time job. I am always seeking God's direction on how best to adapt her home into her private nursing home. She can no longer [...]
Good morning... As I held the soft hands of 91 year old Betty Skinner, she said something like this, "Sue, I really love this season in my life. There is little I need to do each day. I have many hours to pray, to read, to commune with God. This is a sweet, sweet season. But I must tell [...]
Good morning... Betty Skinner walked slowly from the rugged valley of clinical depression up toward the mountaintop of joyful oneness with God. How did she do it? Betty took one healing step at a time. Solitude. Silence. Contemplative prayer. Eating well. Journaling thoughts. Creating art and poetry. Focusing on life's positives. Talking honestly with others. Enjoying long walks outside [...]
Good morning... "Beautiful young people are accidents of nature," said Eleanor Roosevelt. "But beautiful old people are works of art." Last week, I shared my birthday lunch with beautiful 91 year old Betty Skinner. She truly is a work of art. Kitty Crenshaw and Dr. Cathy Snapp, authors of The Hidden Life Awakened, the book chronicling Betty's extraordinary life, [...]
Good morning... In a memorable service, we honored his life. A father and a grandfather. A coach and a mentor. A friend and a legend. His full-bodied life we honored wholeheartedly. At the reception afterward, I quietly browsed the table of memorabilia. Awards and pictures. Boyhood smile to doting dad to grinning grandad. Snapshot after snapshot captured his unique [...]
Good morning… If you know me, you know I love the first edition of Crenshaw and Snapp's The Hidden Life, an inspiring book chronicling Betty Skinner's holy journey from the depths of debilitating depression, which landed her in a psychiatric ward in the 1960's, to the joy of being reshaped, recreated, reborn, surrendered daily to God's transformational power. Aside [...]
Good morning... "Mom, why are you completely naked?" my seventeen year old daughter's voice shocked me into laughter. I had forgotten she was upstairs in bed, gifted with a free period before her day of school. While warm bath water was being drawn, I was lollygagging in the living room in my first birthday suit. Oh, how we surprised [...]
Good morning... Millions of people around the world turned out for hundreds of simultaneous gatherings on Saturday. More than one million people joined marches in the United States, including hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., for the Women’s March on Washington. “Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy,” President Trump tweeted. “Even if I don’t always agree, I [...]
Good morning... A friend shared with me Richard Rohr's daily devotional from 12.1.16. How beautifully these threads of wisdom weave into God's tapestry blanketing us. Rohr writes: "At the more mature stages of life...the painful and the formerly excluded parts gradually belong to a slowly growing and unified field. This shows itself as a foundational compassion, especially toward all [...]
Good morning... God's wisdom echoes. “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys [...]
