18 May, 2020
I’ve been living with a sore neck since sometime last summer. It got out of whack somehow (I think I’m blaming the pull lawnmower and/or the dog), and nothing I did helped. It would be better some days than others, but then I’d go to sleep and...
17 May, 2020
Mother Teresa once said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” And she is SO right (though I don’t always appreciate that). Jesus never said, “Judge others as I have judged you.” Nope. He said, “ Love others as I have loved you...
16 May, 2020
Yesterday I talked about God as a verb. Today I’m wondering if we all shouldn’t shed the notion of ourselves as nouns, things, objects. We are human beings after all. English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, was fond of saying, “Stamp out all...
14 May, 2020
Does my life have meaning? I imagine this is a question we’ve all wrestled with once or twice. It is a profoundly deep question. But I didn’t realize it was a flawed question until I read something that Parker Palmer wrote. Basically, he said...
13 May, 2020
Yesterday I was getting ready to cook some Italian chicken sausage on the grill for lunch. I set the plate of sausage down for a minute to go in search of the lighter, I wasn’t gone for more than a minute and when I returned two of the four...
12 May, 2020
This time of quarantining, or staying at home, puts a whole new perspective on Anne Frank and her family who spent 761 days in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II. 761 days! Can you imagine? No sunshine on your...
11 May, 2020
Brother David Steindl-Rast said, “In everything we experience, we can hear God singing, if we listen attentively.” Stop for just a moment. Take a deep breath. Do you hear it? If I pause to intentionally listen for God’s singing, I feel the...
10 May, 2020
Happy Mother’s Day! I know all too well that Mother’s Day is difficult for many people, for a variety of reasons. Plus motherhood takes many different shapes and forms, no one better than another. When I’ve preached on Mother’s Day I’ve always...
09 May, 2020
I don’t know why our house gets so dusty, but it does. And it is really hard to motivate to clean when no one can come over anyway. Still, I have some standards and was running a cloth over some of the surfaces last week when Julie looked at me...
08 May, 2020
Last week I came across an interesting quote by Alfred Korzybski, an American-Polish mathematician and philosopher who said, “The map is not the territory.” The spiritual extrapolation of this might be, “The Bible is not God” or “The Church is...