Good morning... "First snow day of the season!" my sister texted the picture above from her small town in Ohio. As kids growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, we absolutely loved snow days off from school. "Oh how gorgeous," I replied. "We had minuscule specks of snow blowing in the air yesterday. Your beautiful snow photo provides [...]
Good morning... Sitting social distanced beneath our back porch, she pulled out her phone and texted me photos of a fun activity she had done with her grandchildren, tracing their outstretched arms, painting and cutting out the paper arms, and sending them to their great grandmother with a personal love poem. She gave me permission to share this [...]
Good morning... In his message as a high school chaplain, recorded the day before Election Day 2020 and shared the day after all votes were cast, my husband Steve challenges us to asks ourselves, "What if? What if we have to live with people who don't think like us, believe like us, act like us, or vote like [...]
Good morning... I have heard from many of you who have suffered the loss of a lifelong friend due to differing beliefs, since mentioning my own unexpected loss in our recent post, Being Bulldozed. One of your responses touched me so deeply that I asked permission to share the story with our online community as God tenderizes our [...]
Good morning... Still in my pajamas, I sat outside on our private back porch. Admiring the thick canopy of summer leaves, I fully engaged in a hard, life-giving phone call. After listening and talking for as long as was needed, we hung up and I checked my email to find this inspirational story from a faraway subscriber. [...]
Good morning... After watching footage of the massive explosion rocking Lebanon's capital city of Beirut this week, I turned on the news to see the touching story below. Titling her homemade video Beauty From Ashes, a granddaughter filmed her grandmother playing “Auld Lang Syne” on the piano amid wreckage from the blast. The familiar song, based on a 1788 [...]
Good morning... As I plugged in my phone before climbing into bed, her text message instantly appeared. "Dearest Sue I have missed being in touch with you my friend," she wrote from afar. "I don't have a lot of time this moment because I am working on my mom's memorial service. I have been in Jackson, Mississippi for [...]
Good morning... I woke yesterday congested, with a scratchy throat, possibly a bit of a fever. It is common for me to get a summer cold, out in the heat and back into the air conditioning, swimming in a pool and hanging out with wet hair. Hence the term "common cold." I know what to do when I [...]
Good morning... I followed the suggestion given in yesterday's blog post, Stand Actively Silent. "Active silence," Dr. James Johnson explained, "is stepping to the back of the line and creating space and opportunity for others to speak, especially those who don’t look like me or experience life as I do – those voices that I don’t normally hear." In [...]
Good morning... "I thoroughly enjoyed last week's post about the power of perspective," one subscriber wrote. "It resonated with me and my family history. My parents were born in the United States but my grandparents were born in Japan. My grandparents immigrated to the United States when they were teenagers looking for a better life. My parents lived in [...]
