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 [...]
Good morning... "I think we need to cancel the March women's conference," speaker Dr. Cathy Snapp said over the phone. What? What are you talking about? My mind silently reeled. Cancel the "Awake To Wholeness Women's Retreat" we have been planning for over a year? But so many people have invested so many hours. How can we cancel? As [...]
Good morning... "Who can use the term 'gone viral' now without shuddering a little?" begins the intriguing article Margit Steinholt sent me from Norway, alongside the photo above capturing the snowy view from her home. "Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming [...]
Good morning... Before the world began, God hardwired us for abundant life, on earth as it is in heaven. Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out. Is there anyone around who can explain God? Anyone smart enough to [...]
Good morning... "God, why did I scarf down three cookies?" became my deep prayer after my impulsive episode. I must tell you, these were not tiny Girl Scout cookies. These three cookies were mammoth mommas. "What was going on in me?" Fear, worry, anxiety. I faced a hard phone call. I didn't know exactly what to say, how [...]
