Good morning... 2 Corinthians 8:10-20 The Message So here’s what I think: The best thing you can do right now is to finish what you started last year and not let those good intentions grow stale. Your heart’s been in the right place all along. You’ve got what it takes to finish it up, so go to it. [...]
Good morning... At 1:23 am this morning, I received the monthly devotional newsletter sent from Jan Johnson, a California professor who taught our spiritual direction training program at Ignatius House Retreat Center here in Atlanta, the author of a beloved book we later studied as a class in our living room, When The Soul Listens. One image Jan [...]
Good morning... Yesterday morning, tragedy severed the life of another young man for whom I love to serve homemade Stromboli. Now, huddled together, we nestle into the nurturing nest God is building within our online community. How do we respond to this special kind of grief, processing the life-changing loss of family and friends ravaged by the effects [...]
Good morning... "I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance [to the full, till it overflows]" says Jesus in John 10:10b (AMP). How do we do this in our everyday lives? We surround ourselves with joy-producers. I love this picture because it embodies my personal joy-producers. I am ...Sue... [...]
Good morning... 2 Peter 3:8-9 The Message [ The Day the Sky Will Collapse ] Don’t overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back [...]
Good morning... When our freshman at Ole Miss was recently home for a long weekend, she was working on a paper about the "self-reference effect," a phenomenon of memory that causes an individual to integrate an experience differently depending on their own degree of personal involvement with the art, the person, the event itself. Media is a mediator, a [...]
Good morning... After reading yesterday's post, One Sacred Moment, our friend Cathy Smith described to me a beautiful experience. Her daughter, Abby, journeyed with cancer for five years before going to heaven at age seven. With Cathy's permission, I share with you her story. ****** When we were on Abby's Make a Wish trip after she had first relapsed [...]
Good Morning... As I walked the beach last summer, I saw tons of broken seashells. Picking up various shells, I noticed their unique beauty, their one-of-a-kind shape, texture, color. I wondered with each, “What story do you have to tell?” Weathering. The word weathering filled my mind. To weather is to bear up against and come safely through trouble [...]
Good Morning... Being the first awake at our writers' retreat offers a plethora of pleasures. I embody Richard Foster's quote: my "spirit is on tiptoe - alert and listening." The air is dark. Alone time, peaceful. Quiet rings in my ears as I perch on the open-air porch, filling my open-blank journal. What is that sound? Critters rub their [...]
Sometimes we live too up-close to people. We hang on the bumper of our loved ones, directing. We hang on the bumper of our enemies, raging. Enmeshed, we try to fix, save, change each other. Tailgating, we engender co-dependency, an intensely emotional form of loving and hating. Given a slight break in life's bumper to bumper traffic, a truck [...]
