Good morning… I just got up from my morning ritual of quiet time with God and my open Bible, a random pen and my current journal. For my spiritual direction training program, our cohort of classmates has been walking slowly through Larry Warner's book Journey with Jesus, an adaptation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, Exercises written to [...]
Good morning... "Our spiritual life is not one slice in a loaf of bread with others slices representing family, work, church, neighborhood, and so on," says author and spiritual director Jan Johnson. "Our life with God is the leaven permeating the entire loaf. And when we ignore God's presence in all of life, our soul weakens and we shrink [...]
Good morning... As I held the soft hands of 91 year old Betty Skinner, she said something like this, "Sue, I really love this season in my life. There is little I need to do each day. I have many hours to pray, to read, to commune with God. This is a sweet, sweet season. But I must tell [...]
Good morning... The joy and pain of being a writer is an incessant obsession with choosing the perfect word. It is hard for my mind to rest when my soul continues to wonder, "What changes might make my final tweet truer, better, more impactful?" So it did not surprise me that after yesterday's post, I spent some time pondering, [...]
Good morning... As I finished off my Spiritual Direction paper due by midnight last night, I was drawn back to this quote. "We have been raised from the dull sphere of mere mind and matter into the heavenly radiance of the spirit world; and now, as spiritual (beings), we discern spiritual things, we feel the forces which are paramount [...]
Good morning… Our daughter is struggling to make some major life decisions. Which college? What major? Who to befriend? We as parents are prayerfully dialoguing with her, and we all would love God's will for her to be revealed clearly. Soon. I thought of her as I read these words in one of my Spiritual Direction books this week. [...]
Good morning... We often miss two words in the following sentence. By the seventh day God had finished his work, and so he rested (Genesis 2:2, CEV). We focus our attention on "work" and "rest," understanding our need to rock between both. Unfortunately, we overlook the words "finish" and "his." When my mind's eye gets tired, I envision two [...]
Good morning... One of the books we are studying in my living room this semester is Margaret Silf's The Other Side of Chaos: Breaking Through When Life Breaks Down. On pages 5 and 6, we read: "Transitions make you ache everywhere. They make you ache, in every joint and muscle and in every brain cell, and in every fiber [...]
Good morning... One line lingers from yesterday's "sue2you" message. "Oh honey, even the saints had spiritual dry spells!" It strikes me that spiritual "dry spells" are not really dry. Actually, dry spells of the Spirit are quite often wet. Wet with weeping. Moist with meaning. Damp with deep desire. Spiritual "dry spells" carry us downstream toward the Savior of [...]
Good morning... After reading yesterday's message, "From dark to dawn," she wrote: "Oh my goodness Sue, we have such parallel stories. Please share Lindsay McCaul's beautiful song "Take My Hand" with your subscriber. Like you, my disconnected time followed a move that unexpectedly brought up emotions of loss from a miscarriage suffered over a decade earlier. We lost a [...]
