Category Archives: Healing

The Left-Handed Blessing of Christmas Eve

  On Christmas Eve, as I placed a piece of bread in a man’s hands, he gripped my arm and said, “29 years of sobriety. Thank you.” Normally, the communion ritual is mute, except for the words of administration. “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” Sometimes the recipient says only, “Amen.” So be…

Hope is not Optimism

Hope

This is Advent, the season of hope. Yet our hopes were dashed on Friday. Many people haven’t felt like this since 9/11. The tragedy that struck that elementary school in Newtown makes us wonder. Is there any hope? Any hope for the kingdom? For a world where the lion and the lamb lie down together? Hope, the great…

Christmas After Newtown

I lit a fire in the hearth this morning and turned on the lights of the bare Christmas tree. It was six a.m., cold outside with a grey morning light. Nine days before Christmas Eve. Twenty little children have been killed in their classrooms, festooned with holiday decorations and happily cluttered with Christmas crafts. I…

Ninety in Ninety

man kneeling

Ninety in ninety. That’s what my friend—I’ll call him Gary—had just accomplished a week earlier. Ninety AA meetings in ninety days. We sat in a coffee shop last night and I heard his story. There are a thousand ways to be a drunk, but one outcome. You can’t stop drinking even though it’s killing you…

The Broken Pot

cracked pot

Many of the people who come to me with a problem or difficulty are struggling with their own imperfection, their own brokenness. We are so hard on ourselves. We can perhaps forgive others, but we cannot forgive ourselves. I know this problem from the inside. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I want things to be perfect…

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About the author

I’m a writing pastor, privileged to work among the people of Saint Luke’s Parish in Darien, Connecticut. I love this work. I spend my days with people who are trying to live lives of faith in a pretty forbidding world. I’m lucky—people talk to me, share their stories, nurse their doubts and questions, ask me how to find God when you’re so stressed you can hardly breathe. Mostly I listen, tell them they’re not alone. I don’t have many answers, but I love the quest. I sit in front of a screen and write my way to God. I never know where I’m going when I start, I just try to tell what amounts to a story. And when it’s true, the story takes me home.

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Get David's first book, Breakfast Epiphanies: Finding Wonder in the Everyday.
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