Thank you to all the faithful readers who have returned to these pages through the months of no new posts. My father passed away earlier this year, and my mother two years before that. It’s been a difficult transition losing both my parents, as I feel relatively young for this phase of life. And as […]
New Year’s Resolutions
Happy New Year, Day 2! I spent a good part of yesterday reading other people’s ideas of what NY resolutions should look like, as well as pondering some of my own. Yes I am a big “resolution” fan…someone now dead and gone once said seeing transformation in your life involves resolving to make the changes […]
Re-remembering 9/11
I tried talking with my father today about the 9/11 attacks. There have been some wonderful specials on TV recently, and as I tried to relate these to him on a level his Alzheimer’s might allow, I realized he didn’t remember the attacks on America at all. But he was alarmed to think that our […]
Memories
“Memories, may be beautiful and yet…what’s too painful to remember, we simply chose to forget.“ —from The Way We Were Memories certainly can be beautiful or painful. Jack, my husband, plays Ce La Luna Mezz’o Mare (a Sicilian song) on his iPod each morning. Says it reminds him of his father, who used to sing […]
Unity in Christ-Windows of Glass
Paradox [par-uh-doks] -noun. “Any person, thing, or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature.” Paradoxes are usually called such because they create tension. I have always enjoyed stained glass windows as symbolic images of paradoxical ideas, because of how seemingly incongruent shapes and odd mixes of color combine to form something incredibly beautiful when light shines […]
Unity in Christ-Grafted into Eternity
To our finite minds, eternity is an extremely difficult concept to grasp. Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, said God has placed “eternity in the human heart” (Eccl. 3:11). Makes me think of a built-in homing device…a beacon that keeps pointing us toward our true home with God. But the wiring has gone bad, […]
Unity in Christ-Grafted Branches
There is a tree in our garden that bears four different types of apples: Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Fuji and MacIntosh. I am not an orchardist and I don’t know the first thing about grafting trees, but I know this is the technique used to produce the unique apple tree growing in my yard. Moreover, […]
Guard Your Heart Part 2
MAY 29, 2011 My last post focused on things we do, or that happen to us, that can create a hard heart. A hard heart occurs when we ignore the still small voice of God, encouraging us to remain open to Him. When we place our own wills above the Father’s will for us, and […]
Growth or Grounded?
One of the blogs I follow is the Internet Monk (www.internetmonk.com), and I read with special interest the May 9 post, “The Sermonator and the Culture of Pizzazz,” regarding Chuck Swindoll and the particular evangelical movement, over the past couple of decades, toward ‘entertaining’ or ‘high production’ worship. You see, I cut my spiritual teeth […]
To God – With Love
We’ve all heard the saying: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” I heard it again recently, and wondered, does the Christian faith have a ‘main thing’? Something that could be considered the heart message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Certainly, John 3:16 comes to mind. In one succinct […]