Good morning... "Good vines require cutting and more cutting," says Sr. Judith Sutera, a Benedictine nun and vinedresser. "A mile of runners won't give you one more grape, so get rid of the branches that do not bear fruit. Do you want to keep everything? Then expect nothing. Cut. And then cut some more." By nature, I am [...]
Good morning... On September 10th at 9:48 am, after reading our post, We Are Learning To Trust, one reader wrote me a touching email. "Last night my family and I moved my husband of 63 years into hospice care. Your writing about trust spoke to me profoundly this morning. My journey these next few weeks or days leaves [...]
Good morning... "Sue, Thank you for your post this morning," she wrote after yesterday's message Flip On The Light. "Watching the movie clip made me smile and cry, which surprised me. I think it is a lot of things wrapped into one." She went on to explain, "One of the greatest compliments that I have received, since our 7-year-old [...]
Good morning... With loss after loss after loss, it feels like tragedy swarms like bees around me and my husband. I sometimes feel like whispering a warning to people, "Do NOT be our friend." My fearful thinking continues: "Because if you are our friend, deep pain may descend." Then one of you wrote me a truly touching email [...]
Good morning... Receiving this sympathy email from the church, our community's loss is formally announced. Sympathy Northside Church extends its deepest sympathy to the family and friends of Cole McAfee Hagood, who passed away on Saturday, July 6, 2019. Memorial Service The Memorial Service will be at Northside Church in the Sanctuary on Friday, July 12, 2019 at 2:00 [...]
Good morning... Yesterday morning, tragedy cut short the life of another young man, a young man for whom I love to serve homemade Stromboli. Now, huddled together, we nestle into the nurturing nest God has built for our online community. How do we respond to this special kind of grief, processing the life-changing loss of family and friends [...]
Good morning... At Tuesday's memorial service, two dearly loved daughters stepped up to the microphone. One recounted a string of incredible memories of a passionate dad who held nothing back, loving freely and fully, each day of his life. The other daughter read aloud the following poem, allowing us all to feel the power of deep love living [...]
Good morning... Yesterday's morning message, My Change Of Heart, set off the largest avalanche of responses from one blog post, ever. Too large of a pile to sift through in one follow-up, we will examine a single pebble from our pile today. "I trust you know what God is doing," one subscriber wrote and many of you echoed. [...]
Good morning... "Sue, my dear friend," he wrote, "this weekend I hope everyone will take three minutes to remember the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died on battlefields across the globe over the years in places like Belleau Wood, the beaches of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the sands of Iwo Jima, and the meat grinder [...]
Good morning... Two Fridays ago loved ones packed the place, celebrating the life of a young man who died on his nineteenth birthday. Friends and family members shared stories, tearful and touching, funny and full-of-life. One of the minsters urged us to trust this truth: "Nothing is lost that love remembers." The other minister, my husband, told the [...]
