In a staff meeting recently, we were discussing ways to improve our daily processes—ways to make things more effective and, well, easier on everyone. E-mail is our primary means of communication, since not everyone is in the same office. We all get lots of e-mail. In the course of the discussion, one person suggested that…
I think it was the early Nineties when I first started keeping a Lenten Journal as a spiritual practice. It was before I had e-mail or any kind of web access. For the first few years, I would choose one friend and write him or her an entry everyday without their even knowing I was…
I’m learning to drink my coffee black. As far back as I can remember, I have put cream in my coffee. I have often said that if the day came that the doctor told me I couldn’t use half and half, I’d cash in my chips right there. But the doctor wasn’t the one who…
Sunday morning I got up early and drove about an hour down I-95 to hear Rachel Held Evans preach at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was speaking as a part of their very cool Courage and Faith series. Her sermon came from the story of Jesus healing the blind man in John 9….
light matters I stopped at the sink to rinse out my coffee cup at the very instant that the rising sun shot anticipatory flames of color from below the horizon, igniting the clouds with incendiary hope for just a minute . . . . Before I could call you to the window the fire had…
I didn’t write over the weekend because I made a trip back to Durham, North Carolina to take care of some business and see some friends. I am grateful that the necessity of the former offered the gift of the latter. Since I had some things that needed to get from Guilford to Durham, I…
Uncle Howard and I met for breakfast again this morning, as has been my lenten custom thus far, and he woke me with these words: Again and again, we are impressed with the fact that little things can make big differences. A little act of kindness at a moment of great need makes all the…
I read some more of Howard Thurman’s Deep is the Hunger on the train to New York this morning, and found myself trying to imagine what he sounded like by the tone of his writing, which has a centering nature about it. I called my friend Kenny tonight, who studied with Thurman in the late…
Bryan is one of the folks who was a part of the youth group at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth back when I was Youth Minster. He mentioned in a post that today marked the thirtieth anniversary of the release of U2’s The Joshua Tree. In a comment, one of his friends told how…
palm reader I’ve been staring at my palm: the little litany of lines that runs from wrist to thumb, the deep-rutted roads like poorly-planned highways across a desert of aging skin— dry riverbeds: canyons carved by age and action, crossed and connected by the lesser lines, faded reminders of days when dreams roamed these valleys…