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happy new year

Posted on December 29, 2006 | Filed Under grace, humility, spirituality 

Humility is the first step
Acknowledging that you cannot
Pull the right strings, making life dance to your beat, or
Push the right buttons to guarantee the future
You have in mind.

Now is the time! the time to release pride and fear, the time to
Embrace the God who embraces you, to
Welcome the future God has in mind, to say

Yes! to God and Yes! to God’s way, to
Expect that God’s way leads to a glorious future for us all, and to
Act on that expectation, hoping and loving and serving and making peace,
Right here, right now!

well said …

Posted on September 20, 2006 | Filed Under spirituality 

A Christian View of War
By Oliver “Buzz” Thomas

“Pray for our troops.”

Millions of signs and bumper stickers carry the message, and part of me likes it. But part of me keeps waiting for another bumper sticker — the one I still haven’t seen. Whether Jesus would drive an SUV, I’m still not sure. Truth is he’d probably ride the bus. Or the subway. But if he had money for a car and didn’t give it all away to the hookers and the homeless before he got to the used-car lot, I’m pretty sure that his bumper sticker would say “pray …

the face in the mirror

Posted on September 19, 2006 | Filed Under beauty, justice 

You should review the short documentary film made by a New York City high school student: A Girl Like Me. A September 19 editorial by Leonard Pitts led me to the site. As he writes, Be warned: if you have a heart, the new doll test will break it.

Our culture does a very poor job at recognizing and affirming real beauty. I believe beauty is there to be found, in many different sizes and shapes … and colors. So many fail to see beauty when they look into a mirror — or look into their own souls — because …

a view through the trees

Posted on September 2, 2006 | Filed Under beauty, favorite posts, personal life, spirituality, the natural world 

I like this photograph.

It is different from most of my other Monhegan photos — no stunning cliffs rising from the sea, no waves exploding on the rocks guarding the shoreline, no colorful lilies or picturesque lighthouses or interesting people — just this view through the trees.

Is it a photograph of the sea or is the sea just the background? Is our attention drawn by the dead tree in the foreground or do we see past the tree? …

making sense, moving forward

Posted on August 23, 2006 | Filed Under favorite posts, grace, humility, spirituality, tolerance 

We live in a world that is so different from the world of the generations that have preceded us. The pace of change is dizzying. The amount of accessible — unavoidably accessible! — information is overwhelming. We bear the burden of knowing too much, almost more than we can bear to know. It is not only the problems of family and community and region that weigh on our hearts, but the problems of a whole world: famine and disease and natural disaster, war and oppression and unabashed genocide, injustice and mistrust and entrenched hatred. We know so much about the …

be patient

Posted on July 11, 2006 | Filed Under personal life, spirituality 

Be patient …

Do not let the burden of the enormous task ahead of you overwhelm you and debilitate you. Yours is not the responsibility of the end result, but only of the next step. Do what you can, what God has equipped you to do. Do that faithfully, one step, one piece, at a time, and God will make of it something good.

Do not worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. And the God who walks with you today will be there to walk with you tomorrow, whatever tomorrow brings …

no excuses

Posted on July 6, 2006 | Filed Under spirituality 

There are no excuses, only choices.

I shared that observation with our church family this last Sunday as part of the report given by our mission trip team. We had just returned from eleven days in West Virginia — we, being four adults and six high school students. That observation was underlined once more for me by what I saw and by what we did. We spent five days painting and repairing a home in a town in southwest West Virginia and spent several more days enjoying the West Virginia mountains and the challenge of play in the mountains.

One of …

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