Good morning... As I wrote a reminder email to my Tuesday class yesterday morning, I included the following quote from this week's chapter. In the afternoon, we settled into my living room. We shared thoughts and learned collaboratively. As we talked candidly about the things that get in the way of our whole hearted living, we read these words [...]
Good morning... As many of you know, I am in the middle of a Spiritual Direction training program and the dense, intense reading is very hard for me. With my dyslexic, ADD brain, I read slowly and I struggle with comprehension. Unlike many of you avid readers, I cannot read for thirty minutes, do another task, then return to [...]
Good morning... 900. That's right. A whoppin' 900 points were scored on the single SAT test I took in 1980. Nowadays, a handful of brainiacs score the perfect 1600, many kids score just below perfection, and every high school student I know gets a tutor and takes the test two, three, four or more times to boost their chances [...]
Good morning... "You're a good, good Father. It's who You. It's who You are. It's who You are." "And I'm loved by You. It's who I am. It's who I am. It's who I am." "You are perfect in all of Your ways. You are perfect in of Your ways. You are perfect in all of Your ways, O [...]
Good morning... "Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it - it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experience is hide or bury our story. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes" (p. 9. in Brene Browne's The [...]
Good morning… Letting down our guard and sharing our genuine self is a lot easier said than done. In truth, our guard is an important part of us, serving us well until it doesn't anymore. We are handmade uniquely in our Creator's image (Genesis 1:27) and filled with the living breath of God (Genesis 2:7). Freshly formed from our [...]
Good morning... "Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What? You, too? I thought I was the only one!'" - C.S. Lewis I have witnessed similar exchanges amid Bible study after Bible study these past few weeks. When we let down our guard and share our genuine selves, "What? You, too?" experiences birth new [...]
Good morning... After reading yesterday's blog God's Grace With Skin On, my writer-friend wrote: "I read your blog with tears of joy and gratefulness. God really does make beauty from ashes. He used your extraordinary skills to transform what I felt was ugliness into something for His Kingdom. Sometimes people need to see an honest exchange like we had in [...]
Good morning... God says, "I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19). "'Choose life.' That's God's call for us, and there is not a moment in which we do not have to make that choice. Life and death are always before us. In our [...]
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 [...]
