Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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Judgers and Blessers
Priests and ministers get calls from the local funeral home all the time. Someone has died. They may have been Methodist or Lutheran or Episcopalian, whatever the denomination of your church, but that’s the only, tenuous connection. Would you come and do a service? I walked into the funeral home and met the two daughters.…
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Lean Into the Light
Today—February 2nd—is a big turning point. It’s a great cross-quarter day, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. In ancient, agricultural societies it was regarded as the beginning of spring—the time for first turning the soil in preparation for March planting. There were prayers and rituals centered on the fertility of the…
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Day Number 21,328
“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” -Psalm 90:12 I have done the math, and the number of my days since birth is 21, 328. (It’s easy: go to numbermydays.com and enter your birthday.) I don’t suggest you take the Psalm literally, but it’s not a bad…
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God is Not Urgent
About now, many of us are looking at our New Year’s resolutions and wondering what happened to our resolve. I don’t care much for resolutions, since they are mostly attempts to arm-wrestle small problems into submission without having to look plainly at one’s life. I like “priorities” instead of “resolutions.” Which reminds me immediately of…
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Where is Your Life Taking You?
Where is your life taking you? That’s the question I heard Parker Palmer asking. The Quaker wise man was being interviewed. “I had to ask myself,” he said, “where my life was taking me, rather than just where I was trying to take my life.” It’s important to try to take your life somewhere. Without…
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Clock or Compass?
We live by the clock. Running as fast as we can, trying to cram in one more thing. We vie with each other for the distinction of being the “busiest.” In his book First Things First, Stephen Covey suggests a different orientation. We ought to live not by the clock but by the compass, finding…
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Tired of All the Noise?
We expect monks and mystics to tell us how important silence is. Gordon Hempton is neither of those. He is an acoustic ecologist, someone who studies the sound of the natural world and seeks to preserve it. In his book, One Square Inch of Silence, Hempton says there are less than a dozen places left…
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The Work of Doing Nothing
“He started out head up and facing me,” my daughter Maggy is saying to me. “But now he’s turned head down, facing away from me. Perfect position.” She was something like six months along. I wanted to know how he (we know it’s a boy in there) makes these turns, gets all lined up. “Oh,”…