Gaining a heart of wisdom
When the Cambridge Dictionary announced their word of the year for 2021, I did an enthusiastic double take. Their choice of perseverance may have been inspired by the name of the space rover that landed on Mars in February 2021, but it is also a noun form of my own word of the year: PERSEVERE.… Continue reading A Prayer for You as We Persevere through the End of a Long Year
Sunday Scripture When I showed up at her door with muffins, I had no idea how sick she had become or how short her precipitous decline would be. In hindsight, I'm grateful for the memory of that last visit with a friend, with her flitting between table and kitchen counter and me working hard to… Continue reading How to Cope with Frustration, Disappointment, and Fear at Christmas Time
This week, I started listening to Christmas music in the car on the way to work. Our 24/7 Christmas music radio station plays everything from crooning Bing to the musical equivalent of an ugly Christmas sweater. One frosty morning, fresh off my Advent devotional reading and a mug of hot tea, the radio wished me… Continue reading Do You Know What Song Your Heart Will Be Singing This Christmas?
Sunday Scripture Sunday morning at Spruce Head Community is a sociological patchwork. Members with advanced degrees worship cheek-by-jowl with high school dropouts. Successful businessmen toss their offering into the same receptacle as welfare recipients, and the octogenarian great-grandmother grins at the antics of tiny, scampering escapees from the nursery. I can't help but picture our… Continue reading No Longer a Divided Space, Now It’s a Celebration Place!
As unimaginable as it sounds to 21st-century ears, Anna the prophetess made a career of waiting. Widowed after her seventh anniversary, the next eight decades of her life revolved around the temple in Jerusalem. Her patient attendance there embodied the posture of her people, the nation of Israel, for they had long been waiting for… Continue reading How to Find Christmas Joy in a World of Waiting
Sunday Scripture One of my earliest Christmas memories is the sadness of learning that for baby Jesus there was "no room in the inn." Adding to my distress was the mistaken idea that they had no source of water either--a simple misunderstanding of the Christmas carol, Noel--interpreted by pre-school ears as "no well." Jesus's earliest… Continue reading Are You Making Room for Jesus in Your Advent Celebration?
This month I have been making a practice of noticing all the regular, ordinary parts of my life that inspire gratitude. If we’re friends on Instagram, maybe you’ve seen that I’ve been posting a gratitude journal (almost) daily in my stories, but I haven’t been calling it a gratitude journal. I’ve been calling it a… Continue reading The November Book Talk and Why I Think Gratitude Is Like a Bouquet
The distance around my elliptical driveway is one-tenth of a mile. I know this because I drove around it, watching the odometer—and then did it again just to be sure. Sometimes in the fall, I take a careful jog-trot around its leaf-strewn gravel, a compromise intended to jump-start a flagging metabolism without putting undue wear… Continue reading The Benefit of Keeping an Open Mind to the Possibility of Gratitude
Sunday Scripture Deer hunting season has arrived here in Maine, and this mum of four sons has heard a lot more about the habits and methods of dispatching whitetail deer than I really want to know. However, truth be told, I've been sharing wooded trails with the deer, bearing witness to deer-ish desire, since we… Continue reading Is Desire a Reliable Guide on the Path of Life?
Sunday Scripture On Saturday, I filled the bird feeder, and before I had time to close the front door behind me, an enterprising chickadee had already landed for a late breakfast. Soon, the front yard needed air traffic control to regulate all the landings and take offs. And those honking Canada geese that pass overhead… Continue reading What Makes the Birds Seem So Much Smarter than People?
Living Our Days 