Good morning... On the birthday of my faraway father, I went to an outdoor memorial service for my friend's dad, a celebration of life hosted at the duck pond near his earthly home. Life-giving stories were shared. Tenderizing tears were shed. Together we experienced these words printed in the bulletin. ****** PRAYER OF REMEMBRANCE Leader: We will remember [...]
Good morning... I was inspired by the nine minute talk shared in our blog post yesterday, Doing Hard And Holy Work. Encouraged by twenty-five year old Atlantan, Danielle Coke, I treasure-hunted for the poem she shared at the end of her vulnerable presentation. This young artist and activist offers a creative, colorful invitation into our humble, daily walk [...]
Good morning... Today I went out into the second year of our garden following the weekend's hard rains, and the big purple flowers on this climbing vine are wrecked. Their five-inch round beauty was so bold and life-giving, and now they are destroyed, ripped apart, ruined. I think to myself, "Why did I take their beauty for granted? [...]
Good morning... As I think back on our magical walk through the State Botanical Gardens of Georgia in Athens, I still am amazed at the feast of shapes and sizes, colors and textures, layers of life and sweet intimate intricacies. With God's handiwork freely on display, one unmistakeable quality of our Creator is this: we are each created [...]
Good morning... After a very significant phone conversation, she wrote me a thought-provoking text. "I just saw a photograph on Instagram this evening, the pain and the trauma expressed needs no fact checking," she wrote. "The image was a black woman holding a handwritten sign that read, 'We live in a world where trained cops can panic & [...]
Good morning... "As I read devotions and pray, Riley soaks in God's shining light," texted a dear friend from the Friday morning class which used to meet in our living room before COVID. "What a beautifully peaceful picture!" I responded. "I love it. How is your heart feeling this morning?" "My heart is thankful for true friends and [...]
Good morning... One word sticks with me from this week's blog posts: yield. It strikes me that yield has a double meaning. The Free Dictionary tells us that to yield, on one hand, means to give up one's place to one who is superior, to surrender or to submit, to defer to or to concede. Day after day, we [...]
Good morning... This Easter morn, we remember back to the final moments of Jesus hanging on the cross. A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” [...]
Good morning... "Because of my tech savvy ineptness, I couldn’t write about this picture of a pansy," she wrote me the day after our final Waking Up Whole Zoom class. "This pansy is from my garden," she explained in her follow up email. "I named it 'bloom where you don’t want to be planted.'" I like the persistent [...]
Good morning... As we head into Holy Week (tomorrow is Palm Sunday), I think Henri Nouwen's meditation from yesterday provides powerful perspective. ****** DAILY MEDITATION | MARCH 26, 2021 - Jesus’ Hiddenness I don’t think you’ll ever be able to penetrate the mystery of God’s revelation in Jesus until it strikes you that the major part of Jesus’ [...]
