Good morning... When I try hard to walk a perfectly straight line through the foggy haze of this wounding world, my forceful feet fail me. Peace. Playfulness. Inner balance. These life-giving qualities evaporate. Like a giant balloon girl in the showy Macy's parade, I float through the motions, hovering aimlessly. Ungrounded. Uncertain. Unsettled in my soul. I start [...]
Good morning... Summertime for me is a very different season. At Northside Church, I work only eight hours each week for June and July, attending a monthly meeting for Pastors and Directors, responding to texts and emails each day, and keeping my commitment to walk/talk through life with the women connected to our vibrant ministry. On August 1st, [...]
Good morning... Over the years, several of us have traveled in small groups to Israel with my husband, Rev. Steve Allen, talented trip leader and head chaplain at The Lovett School. The experiences have been breath-taking, eye-opening, life-changing. Many more of us have enjoyed vicariously our blog posts from the Holy Land, year after year, during the spring [...]
Good morning... The prophet Isaiah does not stop at just two questions in Chapter 40 of his book in the Bible, like we identified in yesterday's post. Isaiah actually fills the page with a plethora of question marks. Let's revisit this ancient wisdom, as we deepen into God's definitive answer to the hard questions in life. Who measured [...]
Good morning... As we met on Sunday to discuss the first five chapters of Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, we discussed the central Bible verse, highlighted here in various translations. Micah 6:8 - English Standard Version He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and [...]
Good morning... "She will look back over the kaleidoscope of her life and notice how the fragments of experience that made no sense at the time were, all along, shaping a rather beautiful pattern." This is the sentence God used to snag me, to capture me, to coax me into teaching last semester's book, "Simple Faith" by Margaret [...]
Good morning... I love the healing rituals we do while on retreat. Usually, that is. Usually, I love each wise healing ritual. But yesterday, as instructed, I blindly picked out a rock from a soft bags of stones, and I didn't like it. I didn't like the engraved stone randomly resting in my hand. Other people picked rocks [...]
Good morning... After a fun filled weekend, God just woke me from sleep around 1:00 am, nudging me to read two emails which waited patiently in my inbox. "As you know we are studying Discerning the Voice of God by Priscilla Shirer," wrote a loyal leader of our Banquet Bible study, the longest running study at Northside Church, [...]
Good morning... "When you pray, simply dwell on one line," she encouraged, "something like sucking on a candy rather than gobbling it up, or soaking in a bath rather than jumping in and out of the shower." I prayerfully dwell on one Bible verse. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them [...]
Good morning... This week I have run into one rare word twice, in the thought-provoking image above and in Henri Nouwen's meditation below. Pilgrimage. This is a fresh word found in my everyday life. "A pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about [...]
