Good morning... As we wake on World Gratitude Day 2023, I am totally thankful for unplanned God-moments like the one I experienced yesterday morning. Okay. So we have random books strewn throughout our home. With six people having lived in our family for over the past twenty-eight years, we have remnants of days gone by littering our living [...]
Good morning... I pull out my copy of In the Shelter by Padraig O Tuama and turn to page 25. I read on from the sentence that first captivated me on Sunday. "Good writing, the adage tells us, is when we read something we've always known but never been able to put to words," writes Padraig. "I remember [...]
Good morning... Enjoying our new Monday afternoon time slot, we kicked-off our first PAWkids gathering with an energizing cook-out. Harnessing the power of creative expression, we made a "We Love PAWkids" banner, played tic-tac-toe, traced with stencils/makers/paint sticks, and decorated everything (and everyone) with heart stickers. [...]
Good morning... "Good writing, the adage tells us, is when we read something we've always known but never been able to put into words," explains Padraig O Tuama, the inspiring author of the delightful book we are reading for our Sunday afternoon monthly study, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World. Beside this profound sentence, I [...]
Good morning... In our blog posts this week, we have been exploring the tangled-up places inside of us, culminating in yesterday's post, In This Chaos, Where Is God? Without skipping a beat one reader wrote: "I just read your morning offering and then opened this..." "I can smooth out all the tangled-up places, including those in your mind [...]
Good morning... From miles and miles away, she emailed me after yesterday's post, "I'm All Tangled Up." Our heart and head, tangled. Our fear and worry, tangled. Our love and control, tangled. Our anxiety and stress, tangled. Our depression and grief, tangled. Our gray skies and hope, tangled. Our belief and our journey, tangled. We wake toward a [...]
Good morning... "Oh I wish I could just fly up and join you to make wordless prayer cards," she wrote yesterday from a few states away. Then she explained: "My heart is tangled with my head, my head is tangled with fear, my fear is tangled with worry, my worry is tangled with love, my love is tangled [...]
Good morning... A friend emailed me the Nouwen devotional below. It serves as a grounding reminder: joy and sadness are born together. ****** DAILY MEDITATION | SEPTEMBER 9, 2023 - by Henri Nouwen - Every Bit of Life is Touched by a Bit of Death Joy and sadness are as close to each other as the splendid colored [...]
Good morning... I pulled the three stapled pages from my mailbox at church and read his kind note. "I wanted to share this poem by Billy Collins in case you haven't read it before. Collins wrote it in 2002 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of 9/11/01. I think it captures the heartbreak of the senseless taking of hundreds [...]
Good morning... On Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, suicide hijackers seized U.S. passenger jets and crashed them into two New York skyscrapers, tragically killing nearly three thousand innocent people on one ordinary day. On this Monday, September 11th, 2023 we honor the memory of those loved ones lost on the twenty-second anniversary of the attack, which remains [...]
