Since I preached about joy this week, I thought I might as well put together a hymnal to go with it. When I started looking for joy songs, I found, much as I did in my sermon, that joy doesn’t travel alone. Joy grows out of grief and pain. So that’s where the songs started….
In an earlier chapter of my life, I was a high school English teacher at Charlestown High School in Boston. The student population was a broad mixture of ethnicities but, because of the nature of urban public education in America, what most all of the students shared in common was they were from poor families….
A couple of Sundays ago, Ginger talked about numbers in her sermon, bouncing off of the scripture about God knowing the number of hairs on our collective heads. A couple of nights ago, I talked about the role the Beatles have played in the soundtrack of my life. Tonight, they both come to mind because…
sundown our oldest dog Ella has taken to fits of barking at night doggie sundowning the vet says sometimes I can tell what she wants she barks at the food closet or she stares at the kitchen counter at other times things aren’t so clear her bark a barbaric yawp an existential cry of angst…
unsustainable the first restaurant where I worked was a disaster from the start the owner had dreamed of a tea house but had no idea how to run one we closed on a Tuesday without any warning we should have seen it since the dining room never filled with people but we kept cooking after…
I was probably seven or eight when I started by records–forty-fives, singles. I’m talking 1963 or 1964. Every Sunday after church in Lusaka, we listened to Top of the Pops that was broadcast from the UK on Radio Zambia. I should say I listened. The rest of my family endured it. I couldn’t get enough. To…
It’s late. It’s been a long day. I am looking for words to offer. Part of my day was looking at the lectionary passages for this coming Sunday, since I am preaching. Maybe I am just tired enough for this to make sense, but I found myself paraphrasing 1 Thessalonians 5 as though it was…
One of the annual events Ginger and I have been a part of in Guilford is a service of remembrance for parents who have lost children. It is an astounding time of both grief and healing. Ginger usually speaks or prays and I sing. This year, the service was live streamed, but it was moving…
I preached from both Isaiah 40:1-8 and Mark 1:1-8 because the latter echoes the former. ________________________ Friday morning I got a text from my cousin who is still in ICU with COVID pneumonia. “Today is the first day I don’t feel like doing this,” she wrote. “I’m beat. Three weeks is too long.” The night…
“Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.” –David Whyte, Consolations accounting for non-business majors we never pay inattention the cost of ignoring (ignorance?) requires a different accounting but I never could balance my checkbook, so I’m not the one to keep the ledger other than to say life is going to cost…