How odd that the more forms of communications the 21st century has created, the less we seem to say. Chatter fills the air and mind with both foul and fair words. Daily activities that require direct involvement drain our lives of energy; choosing a contemplative life rather than a reactionary one takes precious time we do not seem to have. When I left teaching some years ago, I set out to study my way through the Bible, not just because I had a generosity of time but to e

At the moment Jaime was born, I asked, “Does she have everything?” to which her father laughed and said, “Everything but a ——.”
 Girls were rare in our families, so we certainly expected a boy, whom we would name Peter. Perhaps because she arrived late, her face was perfect: no redness, no baby flaky skin, no sunken cheeks. 
 Her birth was difficult; after, I clearly remember my nurse cuddling her, stroking her exquisite little face and whispering so only I could hear, “I

Thunder Before Storm
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“ For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. “ Matt 25:27 
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 They were warned.
 Over and over they had been warned. In the beginning, the plagues caused discomfort, horror: all water turned to blood, millions of gnats covered everything, destroying crops and then came the flies. Oh, the flies. And the sores.
 But because they would

The Eye of God A teacher friend who was very knowledgeable of history chided me once for believing the Great Flood in the Bible actually occurred.
 Many places around the world have such mythology about a global flood, he said, that devastated the earth, accounts which coordinate with local folk tales.
 A bit later, I took a graduate English class with a Christian professor and asked him what to do with such a question. His answer?
 Well, of course, many cultures have si

~Watch every sunrise and sunset you can, and not just in the rear view mirror.

The Word of God provides a structure for the spirit as a skeleton does for the body.

God compensates all who draw near him, even the most afflicted.

In the dream, I remember clearly standing in full presence of the universe, strange winds whipping around my body. Poised silently on the face of the earth, I looked out into the expanse of the third heaven. I felt the hand of God; He reached out his forefinger to briefly touch my brain, so sweetly and intimately that I could not then speak nor truly explain it. The mystical mysterious night air was a deeper blue than I have ever imagined, and the stars above the firmament

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us- We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the meanings are - -Emily Dickinson One summer day he and I left by the back door, down the brick walkway and under the trellis around which wraps a thick wisteria vine; as we passed under it, he stopped, and his mouth formed a quiet round "o" as he raised his finger to the top of the trellis. "Look," he whispered, pointing to a nest in which was sitting a mother bir

When my mother died, I kept her purse, a thing she was rarely without even after an enfeebling stroke. Somehow that cheap vinyl bag was part of her identity, an object that held memory and affirmed her. I have her driver’s license, which somewhat horrifies me as I think she could have driven a car legally, even in her debilitated years when her eyes were fixed only on my dad, her Bible and her purse. She recognized her cat, too, but that was about it. When my dad died, I

A scarlet cord runs through the history of mankind from the Old Testament of the Holy Bible to the New, all leading to the eventual arrival of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, as a baby in Bethlehem. 
 Biblical types-typology-verify Scripture; an image, a person or a place in the Old Testament such as the birth of Christ is fulfilled many hundreds of years later called an antitype in the New Testament; types enhance & broaden human understanding of the character of God and truth

An old farmhouse suffers all the anxieties and aches as aging bodies. This one had been remodeled several times: when the walls were torn away, the old wood was laid bare—timbers cut long ago, shaped and trimmed to create its skeleton. It was said that a blacksmith operated his shop under the ancient tree in the back yard where a metal detectorist unearthed mule shoes, fancy faucet heads and Civil War grapeshot projectiles. Remodeling the bathroom uncovered knob-and-tube w

Once I saw a foolish very young woman who had branded herself with her current boyfriend’s name on her slender back. ************** In 1922, the Nazi party began training children as young as 10 years old, compulsory membership required after 1936; their purposes included the destruction of church groups, spying on Bible studies and shifting traditional values. By the age of 14, the boys, the Hitler Jungen, were killers who had become “faithful soldiers.” Some girls

Psalm my God my God the world is washed in red and all that i can do is weep ask no song of me nor joy for to watch is to remember [the world is not the same] when the sky was blue and morning bright my God my God the world was washed in red ********************* Psalm Encaustic on board

Since I had known him—and that was a very, very long time—there was a darkness in him, an inscrutable malice that surfaced now and then, often through lies, through taunts and then through perversion. He showed his iPad to me once, proudly displaying the electronic versions of the Bible he had downloaded. Idly I flipped through his library: positioned alphabetically next to his translations of the Bible was pornography. He chatted about nothing, either oblivious or unconce

Lamb video generated by Grok

On my way to my field in early morning, I pass an empty silent baseball field where a boy played years ago, always watching, waiting to see if his father would come just once. Deer walk boldly down darkened streets, weaving in and out between this yard and that. Suddenly they will be upon you, their eyes glimmering brightly against the beam of the headlights. They stand in the middle of the street, staring insolently as if to say, “It is still night. These streets are ours.

It is a book, life is. You can't look ahead, but you can leaf through what you've already written. Some days I have the sense to read slowly, to savor the pages and relish each moment. Other days the pages flip so quickly I barely have time to see what's happening. (In 2020, I swear sometimes the pages stuck together.) ********************* Her tiny face was perfect, rosy cheeks and a mouth shaped like a heart. In the hospital the nurse held her and said, "I w

After she jumped out a window three floors up, the mental health facility decided she probably needed to live across the street at the other facility, back in those days when Ohio called it the Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities; thus she had come into his life precipitously.

She had spent her life carefully in service to God and others. Now elderly, she still wanted to enrich the lives of others. But like the seasons, the body feels spring, summer, autumn and, finally, winter when we choose to spend long hours sleeping, waiting for the next, the final spring. We complain of weakness, frailty and the pain which is always present. Her doctor suggested a wellness group led by a young woman, where they discussed how to make bodies function more eff