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…
Somedays I come to this page with something to say already in mind, as if to make an offering. Sometimes I come with nothing but raw feelings, almost like a confession or simply a statement of how things are. Tonight is the latter. Thanks for meeting me here. tired the word exhaust means to empty…
winded it’s not just stacking the wood you have to cover it–I know that it doesn’t sound hard, does it I walked down to Page’s and bought a tarp, blue and brown and a pack of bungee cords the first time I centered the tarp and folded in the edges like I was gift-wrapping and…
I don’t know why the thought crossed my mind the other day, other than I had given myself time to do nothing and let my thoughts run unleashed for a bit. What struck me is not original, I’m sure, but it felt significant; it was this: any technological advance carries with it a corresponding dehumanization….