E-Letter 169
It is a gracious gift to be in the presence of someone who “storys” her way to understanding her “real” life, her crowded, sometimes messy life filled with people and events and feelings and small serendipities. As we swoosh down the highway in my aging Honda so early in the morning that even the cows glance at us in surprise, Olivia tells me a story about her discovery of the changes wrought upon her beloved Skittles. In 1974, the Wm. Wrigley, Jr. Company, manufacturer of this enticing, fruit-flavored candy, introduced Skittles to children of all ages. You just popped a handful in your...
Read MoreE-Letter 167
I strain to hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, the One who, at the dawn of time, walked and talked in a pristine garden with Adam and Eve. That first couple, naked and innocent, whispered awake at dawn by the Divine Gardener, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and listened to promises of blessedness hidden in the unfolding of a day. In this garden of Eden, the first man and woman had only to tune their ears to the words of the One True Voice revealing the joy to be found in tending a paradise of living things around them – plants, animals, and each other. When, I wonder, did the couple turn...
Read MoreE-Letter 166
It started the night before, in that brief pause between night and day when the Creator ponders the possible and the probable in silence. I leaned forward in the dark to listen as a fierce wind roared through the thin woods behind my house, forcing the canopy of young trees to kiss the ground in obeisance. I have seen these same trees willingly bend their branches to earth like a graceful gymnast trusting the ground to catch her as she flexes her back, arms, and legs like an archer’s bow. This arboreal bowing, this treeful scraping, however, was not a lithe celebration of youth, but rather...
Read MoreE-Letter 165
Every year, it seems, Thomas the Twin, one of Jesus’ disciples, gets a bad rap the second Sunday of Easter. Every year, it seems, we Christians focus on Thomas’ doubt, his deep, heart-wrenching questions about the events of Golgotha. Behind his back we shake our heads and tsk-tsk even though, deep in our hearts, we suspect we might have joined him in his desperate solitude those hours after the crucifixion. Although all of us at one time or another have felt abandoned and bereft, alone in a dark room as waves of doubt wash over us, it is not a place or a posture we seek. However,...
Read MoreE-Letter 164
A helter skelter wind careened down the street, twisting and turning the stoplight as if it were a toy and forcing the high school students to run to their buses for cover. In the center of the schoolyard, a lone student huddled under the branches of a large Bradford pear tree, its branches waving furiously, arrhythmically, showering the manicured lawn with white blossoms shorn prematurely from the source of their life. The student, caught in an unexpected whirlwind of whiteness, looked up, and I wondered, “Does he hear the groans and notice the tears of an arboreal witness?” In a hurry to...
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