God has made a habit of gatheringundesirables, the less than perfect, or at least those as broken as theyare brazen – I could name namesbut it serves just as well to look ina mirror, or around most any roomfilled with the fallen and faithful;what privilege I enjoy I have notearned; any hardship or sufferingI have…

Over the years of writing this blog, I’ve made some connections with other blog writers. I wish I knew a better way to say it, but our vocabulary hasn’t caught up with our lives just yet. These folks are more than acquaintances because we have shared things about ourselves with each other, but they aren’t…

Over the past several days, I’ve only been able to see bits and pieces of the Winter Olympics, partly because of my work schedule and partly because I’ve chosen other things. I’ve let my knowledge of what’s going on be fed, mostly, by the highlight reels and news blurbs. I’ve heard enough of Joannie Rochette’s…

Sunday night I was working at the Durham restaurant when one of the servers came to tell me that Chuck, one of our vets, was in the dining room. (It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a clinic to raise Schnauzers.) He and his wife were well into the entrees of…

somehow the night has slipped awaywithout leaving the words it promisedand I have spent far too long staring at a white page in a dark room as though the sheer silence of sitting would shape the darkness into sentences and help me keep my promises for LentI have deletedfar more thanI have savedbut that’s truemost…

The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography…

I was reminded of a Madeleine L’Engle story last Sunday because Jake, one of our divinity students, mentioned it in his sermon last Sunday. L’Engle spoke of a couple with a very precocious young daughter who was not thrilled at the prospect of having to share the house with a soon-to-arrive baby brother. Soon after…

I graduated from high school in 1974, which means all my high school dances were before disco took over, which is to say we had live bands. One of my friends was on the committee that picked the bands for our dances. If they could play “Free Ride” and “La Grange” they got the gig….

Over the last several years, and thanks to both inspiration and encouragement from my friends Chris and Kelli, I make handmade cards. I’m not doing much of it right now, but I enjoy looking through the boxes of scrap paper I have to find bits and pieces that collage together into something beautiful. Often the…

I’m in over my head. One chapter into This Is Your Brain on Music and my brain is reeling, trying to take in all the terms and ideas Daniel J. Levitin has crammed into the first chapter. There is enough metaphor and music in those fifty-odd pages to keep me writing all through the night,…