Good morning... As we wake on the final Sunday of July 2020, our minds meander toward fall. Masks. Social distancing. Balancing our need for safety with our craving for human contact. This will be an audacious autumn. In the shadow of a growing death toll, we are made keenly aware: "Life is short." Will we do stuff that [...]
Good morning... It seems to me, grey is the color of waiting. Not old, not new. Not now, not yet. No agenda, no time frame. No end of the tunnel, no finish line in sight. I think back to my most fertile times of waiting, when new life was gestating inside my womb, out of my sight, expanding [...]
Good morning... Her short text included one soulful sketch created by Atlanta artist Danielle Coke. Postive. Powerful. Process-oriented, right? And I will give them one heart [a new heart], and put a new spirit within them. I will take from them the heart of stone, and will give them a heart of flesh [that is responsive to [...]
Good morning... Walking our dog, I noticed this conglomerate rock resting in the grass. I picked it up, held it in the palm of my hand, and thought, "This feels like a symbol of me right now. So much new is rising up from the depths of me, moving steadily from unconscious unknowing into conscious awareness." I brought [...]
Good morning... "Our tendency is to run away from the painful realities or to try to change them as soon as possible," Henri Nouwen's morning meditation from yesterday joins our life-giving conversation. "But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators, and prevents a real community from taking shape. Cure without care makes us preoccupied with quick [...]
Good morning... "Loving can be a difficult business," writes Roberta Bondi on page 35 in To Love As God Loves. "It is impossible to grit the teeth and love, no matter how much we want to. That is because human effort is only one of the two basic elements necessary for the fulfillment of all Christian goals and [...]
Good morning... One week ago today I turned in devotional thoughts to be shared with our church family. Now as a church member, the morning message appears in my inbox. Even in this one single week in the foreverness of time, I sense God illuminating more of me as I feel the growing edge of the Spirit expanding [...]
Good morning... I feel drawn to share with you the uplifting words from yesterday's daily devotional sent from the Henri Nouwen Society. ****** Solitude is the Way to Hope by Henri Nouwen Intuitively, we know that it is important to spend time in solitude. We even start looking forward to this strange period of uselessness. This desire for [...]
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 [...]
