Good morning... Through prayerful writing, yesterday I stumbled upon this concluding truth: "Faced with divine power beyond our understanding, we can resist or we can rest in God's nourishing arms." Rest and resist differ by just two little letters: "is." How we choose to cope with what "is" makes all the difference to our spiritual growth. "Is" relates to [...]
Good morning... A loyal "sue2you" subscriber wrote me a personal response to a recent message. "Your post was very comforting," was the gist of her encouragement. Then she added the following P.S. "I had meant to write you on a previous post a couple of days ago about the trees. LOVED your analogy...always so vivid to strengthen my remembering! [...]
Good morning... In generations past, we simply do not know. We were unaware of violence in Colorado Springs, unaffected by grieving in Paris, and untouched by senseless attacks inside movie theaters and sacred schools, aboard vulnerable airplanes and on faraway street corners. Now, we know of brutal tragedy almost instantly and we watch the images repeated obsessively before our [...]
Good morning... There is always a morning after. After the holiday and after the surgery. After the wedding and after the funeral. After the victory and after the tragedy. Time does not stop moving us along and life is not lived forever in the deepest valley or on the mountain's tippy-top. At peak moments, our human nature yearns to [...]
Good morning.... On this Thanksgiving morn, I am grateful our Creator offers us freedom of choice. The Spirit of God embedded in our heart empowers us to choose love in the face of evil. The husband on the following video lost his beautiful wife, the mother of their seventeen month old son, to the gun of a terrorist. I [...]
Good morning... When I think of Thanksgiving, I think family and friends, football and napping, food preparation and kitchen clean up. I also think Mary and Martha. We pick up the story of these two sisters in Luke 10:38-42 (NIV): ...Martha opened her home to (Jesus). She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening [...]
Good morning... She handed me a "thank you" gift before leaving my living room at the end of the semester. A perfectly shaped bow held the stationery box together. I removed the bow to discover the profound wisdom of C.S. Lewis on each individual card. "We have nothing, if not belief." "Joy is the serious business of heaven." "I [...]
Good morning… I am grateful that my small group of college friends are gifted at keeping in touch, even after thirty years. We are spread throughout the country. Ohio and Pennsylvania. Indiana and Illinois. Maryland and Georgia. Arizona and Virginia. Recently, I reached out to one college friend I had not talked with for a while. Living in Ohio, [...]
Good morning... I love my horse farm. Actually, I believe mine might be the best kind of horse farm around. First, I do not own it, so I do not have to pay the bills. Second, I am not the caretaker, so I do not have to feed the gorgeous animals, maintain the pristine fields, or attend to any [...]
Good morning... Henri Nouwen's Daily Meditation from 11.18.15 deepens my understanding of how we are to live as Christians during these troubled, tumultuous times. Nouwen wisely explains, "Ministry is acting in the Name of Jesus. When all our actions are in the Name, they will bear fruit for eternal life. To act in the Name of Jesus, however, doesn't [...]
