Good morning... Our Julie's Dream prayer team met by Zoom yesterday morning to pray over the lives of the inner city kids we take on trips to explore God's expansive creation. We prayed for the family of kids who recently witnessed their mother murdered by her boyfriend. We prayed for the talented trip leader from a neighboring non-profit [...]
Good morning... After we shared deeply about the pain she was enduring, one friend prayed for another friend over the phone. Capturing the compassion in my journal, I jotted down many of her vulnerable words. Now in the middle of the night I revisit my notes, piecing together this heartfelt prayer. Dear gracious God, Raw and in process, [...]
Good morning... “My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places," writes Marilynne Robinson in the novel Gilead. "That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it [...]
Good morning... I spent the weekend processing our class trip to Montgomery, Alabama to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, beautiful facilities offering experiential opportunities to teach the story of slavery, lynching, racial injustice in our country. I thought, "These memorials remind me of Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center." We [...]
Good morning... After experiencing the Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, I am haunted by the inhumanity, the ugly pain inflicted on millions and millions of black skinned people over the centuries, and the way my privileged, comfortable life has really, really bloody roots. I feel compelled to deal with my [...]
Good morning... We cannot solve the world's pile of problems, but we can discern the next loving thing that is ours to do. Yesterday, "mine to do" was to pass out some of the little pots of pansies I had created in the middle of the night when our internet was out and I was unable to blog. [...]
Good morning... With our internet still out, I come to Starbucks to get service for the third day in a row. I pull out the brochure from our trip to Montgomery, Alabama and snap the photo above. I am struck by the fact that among all the informative words and haunting images, I am holding the pamphlet with [...]
Good morning... Four thousand neighbors and me, we still have no internet. So, once again, no blogging in the middle of the night. Still stirred awake in the wee hours, I was drawn to another form of creativity. Accessing the healing power of pansies! Yesterday, I had cut some pansies from our neighborhood's dying patch before they are [...]
Good morning... Four thousand neighbors struggle with me through an internet outage. We have been without service for about thirty-six hours, thus no blog post this morning. No internet also means no TV, no email, none of the normal communications I usually take for granted. An insight sparks as I sit at Starbucks at 8:30 pm, writing. Our [...]
Good morning... Thoroughly enjoying our final Monday class, we read aloud some of our favorite passages from The Other Side of Chaos by Margaret Silf. The fourteenth chapter is entitled Yesterday Is Already Ours. This enduring truth - yesterday is already ours - is embedded in us as we walk away from a transformative season together. Now let's [...]
