The world is in a mad dash of personal peace and affluence. Sadly, too often the evangelical church is not much different. Of course, we want our children to become Christians. But that is just an addition to the all-consuming goal, that they would a...
For most of us free-thinking, wild hearts, our relationship with God or the Universe will go through peaks and valleys – transforming into new concepts and beliefs, completely disappearing, at times, only then to instantly explode back into existen...
Too many people think that finding the reason God placed us here on earth will come in one assignment with a big title and complete job description. I believe that discovering our purpose will unfold slowly, like a seed planted deep in the ground.
... In our family, if you said the words 'I feel,' they better be followed with 'hungry' or 'cold'. Because we didn't get personal, that's just how it was.
The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what ...
Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, . Remember ...
When a builder builds he clears the ground for his new foundations. Then he sees that the basic structure will support the whole. Should we not also clear the mind - at least that part of it that we can reach - of the ruins of past thinking, before b...
I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, con...
Negative emotions, like depression or anxiety, have been shown to affect our immune system. Stress impedes wound healing.
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoratio...
When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing. We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we ...
All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
He has an interview going on, so if anyone asks you anything about anything, smile and lie." "So, if they ask how it feels to spend our evenings filing briefings from three years ago, we should say it's great? Atticusa asked sarcastically, as he pull...
We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough w...
writing home" here in the wilderness of australia writing home becomes easy in spite of the spreading wild fires there is less heat, more certainty. writing home, writing this i think of those without real homes– our city, people say, provides hous...
We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.
The more adept we become at feeling love and gratitude for all life’s earthly learning experiences, the more quickly we are reminded that, whatever hardship may be placed before us, it is our choice always to return to a place of love and gratitude...
Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst in...
I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of...
And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was pr...
All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and neve...
