Good morning... "When you take a child and you sit a box on top of them, all they know is what is inside the box," said the quote that began this week's morning messages. "But if you remove that box then the rest of the world is at their fingertips." The same is true for all of us, [...]
Good morning... I have heard the expression: "Hurting people hurt." This week I was introduced to the flip side: "Healing people heal." Pondering this phrase in the wee hours of the night, I open an email from Jan Johnson, a California professor from my spiritual direction training program. For me, Jan puts flesh on the bones of these [...]
Good morning... Two quotes of divine wisdom creatively collided and fell into me yesterday. “There's a lovely Hasidic story," writes author Anne Lamott, "of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, 'Why on our hearts, and not in them?' The rabbi [...]
Good morning... The life-changing influence of my favorite book continues to expand. In the fall of 2007, I met the first edition of The Hidden Life Awakened when Becky Anderson, the beloved scribe of Christian mystic Betty Skinner, spoke at our church on the newly released book chronicling Betty's journey up from the valley of clinical depression to the peak [...]
Good morning... In my quiet time of prayer I think about our Jewish friends who witnessed the stabbing of hatred in the safety of their rabbi's home, the shock of Sunday morning worshippers fired upon by a gunman in the sacredness of their small sanctuary, and the complex grief of the family and friends of those misguided men [...]
Good morning... I woke from a brief nap yesterday with an interesting image saturating my mind. I sensed I had been in the presence of Jesus, as if our living LORD had really responded to my early morning prayer, "Steal My Show." Mysteriously it seemed he had actually come from heaven to our home, and I caught him [...]
Good morning... This morning as I spend quality time with God in the little chapel of my soul, I think about the invisible expectations filling each room we enter, especially during the holiday season. The mysterious matrix we quietly step into is made up of unmet wants (our own and others), subtle and not-so-subtle demands, and deeper aching [...]
Good morning... Do you get nervous when you wake up on the morning you are scheduled to be the speaker? I do. I really do. I really do, and here is why. I do not know what I am supposed to say. I do not know what others need to hear. I do not know what joys and sorrows [...]
Good morning... Last Friday night, November 1st, I attended my friend's Day of the Dead party, a sacred evening when we celebrate loved ones who have gone on to heaven. The photo above is the altar I built to honor two young men, two of my 24-year-old son's close high school buddies, who have died suddenly in the [...]
Good morning... Sometimes we meet soul-to-soul before we ever see one another face-to-face. This is the sacred situation occurring between me and a subscriber from Charlotte, North Carolina. Mary writes me periodically to fill me in on her painful process of grieving her son, Dalton, who died suddenly at age twenty-one. In previous posts on the topic of [...]
