Good morning... Sixteen. I saw exactly sixteen of these black caterpillars on one walk last week. Some were crawling. Some were squished. Some littler, some bigger. The sheer number of these creatures in one morning made them impossible for me to ignore. Checking my phone when I arrived home, I was surprised by a text string from a [...]
Good morning... At 7:21 am yesterday, she wrote me in response to our post, I Was So Mad. "I am moved," she said. "This is so strong and authentic, Sue. Thank you for sharing this visceral and vivid depiction of a difficult process. I love the contemporary take on Philippians." Then at 7:23 am she wrote again: "This [...]
Good morning... One of my all time favorite Scripture passages is John 6:43-46 in The Message translation. Jesus said, “Don’t bicker among yourselves over me. You’re not in charge here. The Father who sent me is in charge. He draws people to me—that’s the only way you’ll ever come. Only then do I do my work, putting people together, [...]
Good morning... "While the Fourth of July, 1776, is the day America declared independence from Great Britain, people of color were not able to celebrate that same freedom," explains a letter I recently received from my spiritual direction training program. "On July 4th, 1852, here is what Frederick Douglass said in his speech The Meaning of July Fourth [...]
Good morning... Her email was short and direct. "Sue, what is happening around us? What do we do? Is God listening? Afraid for our world." My response was long and drawn out. "Great questions. I am learning not to just slough off important opportunities to communicate. You are asking so I will answer and these are my prayerful responses." [...]
Good morning... The hands of the hand-painted clock above fell off long ago. This broken clock hangs on the wall in my spiritual direction space, an invitation for me to stay keenly alert for God's perfect timing, kairos versus chronos time. Chronos, clock-time, is the measurable sequence of seconds, minutes, and hours structuring our daily lives. Yet it [...]
Good morning... "I think we are all living in what Rohr calls liminal time," she said to me at a backyard reception following the funeral. Intuitively I agreed, then I thought to myself, "I need to look up the definition of that word again." Liminal. Wikipedia shares this drawing and this detailed description: "In [...]
Good morning... "There is a dead weight of accumulation," Anne Morrow Lindbergh admits in Gift From The Sea, "a coating of false values, habits and burdens which blight life. It is this smothering coat that needs constantly to be stripped off, in life as well as in relationships" (58). Dead weight. Accumulation. Coating of falseness - values, habits, [...]
Good morning... Do you know the root word for quarantine? Quarantine is derived from the Latin quadraginta, meaning "forty." Similarly in Italian, quarantine comes from quaranta meaning "forty," which goes on to form the phrase quaranta giorni, which literally means "space of forty days." We have been at this quarantine routine for more than forty days, and as we consider gradually reopening [...]
Good morning... "Action Ministries now requires you to bring your own personal mask to wear while packing food boxes," she texted me to help find two more people to serve with her small group of friends. Our family already knew the new face mask rule, having served together on Good Friday morn (see our goofy picture above). I quickly [...]
