Blindingly Beautiful
By the light of the sun We flourish
Invited to Rest
The lake is glorious. Restful, peaceful, serene. It doesn’t shout, “Come, play with me!” It doesn’t tease, “Lookie what I’m doing.” It doesn’t tempt with rowdy revelers splashing and sailing and fishing. Well, there are quite a few fishing. No, the Lake at Junaluska just is. It is rest. It is peace. It is serene. […]
Let it be
The icy rain came and covered all of creation with a shimmering sheet. Heavy under its weight it bent and then dripped and then froze, God’s great ice-o-metrics. Fragile. Frozen. Frosted. The snow came and blanketed the icy stillness with layer upon layer of beauty. Limbs bent lower and lower. I can ease their suffering and […]
A Working Retreat?
Oxymorons…you gotta love them. Verbally puzzling expressions that stop and make you think, because they just don’t go together. Today, I am headed 8 hours south into the mountains of North Carolina to a retreat center at Lake Junaluska. There may be more beautiful and restful places than this, but I don’t know them. Alas, […]
Can we see stillness? hear silence?
The still life helps us to see and hear, ever in new ways.
Punching holes in the darkness
I had never heard the story shared by Adam Hamilton in his 2013 Inaugural Prayer Service Sermon. He said, I’ll be telling the old story about Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson, the 19th-century author, once told how, as a boy, he’d been sitting in front of the window at nightfall, watching the lamplighter light the gas street lamps. He would erect […]
Giving the leftovers to God
I’ve always had a bit of trouble with this story told in both Matthew and Mark’s gospels of a Canaanite woman who pleads with Jesus for help to save her demon-possessed daughter and ends up begging for even the crumbs from His table. (Matthew 15:22-28) A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying […]
Raindrops on the window, have you watched them too?
My 22 year old, bi-lingual daughter wrote me. “Look what was on Twitter: Soy ese 99,9999999999999% que de pequeño se quedaba mirando las gotas de lluvia en el cristal del coche para ver como hacían carreras.” She says, “My translation: I’m one of the 99.9999999999999% who as a child sat looking at the raindrops on the […]