Travel Your Avenues
Good morning... How do we bridge the gap between "the haves and have nots" during this extended period of pandemic? Prayerfully with God, we travel the avenues blazed before our feet. We simply travel the avenues of connection opening before us. Our family provides just one example, your family provides another, and each stranger we scooch by in the grocery store provides still another example of outreach opportunity. We are each invited to travel [...]
Flattening Our Curve
Good morning... This Sabbath morn, may we all enter in to the prayer our pastor shared with our church family this week. ****** "In the Life of the Church"- the Pandemic Prayer from Catholic Theological Union May we who are merely inconvenienced Remember those whose lives are at stake. May we who have no risk factors Remember those who are most vulnerable. May we who have the luxury of working from home Remember those [...]
Walk Close Together
Good morning... "God, my shepherd!" says Psalm 23:1-4 in the Message translation. "I don’t need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows, you find me quiet pools to drink from. True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction. Even when the way goes through Death Valley, I’m not afraid when you walk at my side." The twenty-third psalm is one of the most familiar and most comforting passages of Scripture. [...]
Come Rest In Peace
Good morning... To end our Zoom gathering, he gently read to us a poem, a poem I had never met. ****** The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on [...]
Making Room For Zoom
Good morning... This virus exposes our bitter truth: stuck in this together, we are all aging dogs forced to learn new tricks. For the first time in my life, I am making room for Zoom, a virtual event where one person hosts a meeting and multiple participants communicate through the computer screen. With many of us working from home during this season of social distancing, the church hosted our first Pastors and Directors [...]
Think Outside The Box
Good morning... "We're adjusting to a new reality," musicians in this video admit, "and we'll have to find solutions in order to support each other. Creative forces help us, let's think outside the box and use innovation to keep our connection and make it work together. Because if we do it together, we will succeed." This energizing endeavor captured on film reminds me of the Mozart quote, "The music is not in the [...]
Making Art While Apart
Good morning... "Hi, Sue," she responds. "You ask what creative gifts give us strength during this season of sequestering." Artist, photographer, and dear, dear friend Corinne Adams shares with me her intriguing art while we are held apart: "I have discovered my own Walden’s pond in the woods next door. The “pond,” an abandoned swimming pool filled with water, leaves, and muck, invites me to arrange leaves and blooms on its surface. Such [...]
Turning Fifty-Seven
Good morning... Grateful to turn fifty-seven today, I am experiencing my most extreme birthday ever. The word "extreme" is a multifaceted one. As an adjective, "extreme" means very far removed from the ordinary or an outermost point farthest from the norm. As a noun, "extreme" means the highest degree, like "cautious to an extreme," or two things as different from each other as possible, like "the extremes of joy and grief." During this pandemic period, we are [...]
Creativity’s Gift
Good morning... When we gathered together for our final Friday class, we read these words out loud from the lips of ninety-four-year-old Betty Skinner. "The conscious and disciplined work of awakening our senses is vital to the life of the Spirit within us. It helps to move us from our heads to our hearts. The marvel of the five senses is that we can experience the same world five different ways. This is [...]
Bourbon On The Back Porch
Good morning... "Where's dad?" our twenty-one year old daughter asked. "He's on the back porch drinking bourbon with his brother." The sentence sounded super silly as it rolled right off my tongue, since Steve's only brother lives in Omaha, Nebraska umpteen miles away from our corner of the globe in Atlanta, Georgia. A new habit has formed in this "work from home" twilight zone. My husband and his brother each pour a single [...]
Overcoming This Overwhelm
Good morning... Surprisingly, one of my supervisor's survey questions pierced a sensitive nerve, sort of like when the dentist finds a cavity and pain shoots everywhere. "When it comes to workload at Northside, how heavy is the burden or light is the load?" That was the question striking my nesting nerve. We were asked to respond on a scale of 1 ("Honestly, I'm a little bored.") to 10 ("I have too much to complete [...]
Keep Something Beautiful
Good morning... A friend ended her email with a quote from Pascal: "In difficult times, always keep something beautiful in your heart." What "something beautiful" - a hope, a thought, a feeling, a memory - rests in the home of your heart right now? Sense it. Savor it. Slip it into your soul. As you focus fully on this "beautiful something," may your whole being be painted with God's powerful peace. Peace I leave with [...]