A brief meditation for Lent—three times a week. Want to receive an email notification each time David posts?
Click here and the new reflection will be delivered right to your inbox.
-
You’re Not Gonna Wanna Hear This
“No! I told him I wasn’t coming!” The woman answering her cell phone was talking way loud. I was five rows back on the train and the noise disrupted my conversation with Pam. “I don’t care—I’m not going!” Now the whole car was awkwardly silent, forcibly listening. A young man across the aisle from the […]
-
When God Wants Something Done
Tonight the crowds will gather in Iowa to begin choosing the most important, the most powerful man in the world (we Americans are just shoo-ins for hubris, aren’t we?). The media will blitz us with more information, more “stories” than we really need or care about. Let’s remember that we are in a season that […]
-
Embers You Need
Starting a fire in a cold grate is tough. It’s been raining here and even the wood in the shed is wet from sheets of water blowing sideways. My kindling is a little damp. It smokes when I lay it on the pile of flaming newspaper and cardboard. I get close and blow like bellows. […]
-
Christmas in the Trenches
On the day after Christmas the work of Christmas begins. If yesterday we welcomed the Prince of Peace, then today we must live under his most gracious rule. Christmas has the power to break down the walls that separate us and unite us as in our common humanity. That power was never more remarkably demonstrated […]
-
Miracle Child
In this last week of Advent I have been baby blessed. On the shortest day of the year, I held the tiniest child ever placed in my hands. A four-and-a-half pound girl. I held her and thought, You were destined to be, child, because we had to believe that you could live, that you could […]
-
The Day After
The day after. It so depends upon the day before. The wedding was bliss. My daughter Sharon was beautiful, smiling radiantly throughout the ceremony, and my new son Anthony was strikingly handsome in his navy suit and light blue tie. The bridesmaids and the groomsmen were all in a row, childhood friends and college buds […]
-
Me and Mr. Bennet
Christmas will come tomorrow. This Advent we have been watching and waiting for a wedding. My younger daughter Sharon is to marry Anthony Damelio at 4 o’clock tomorrow. Sharon always wanted a “Christmas wedding.” She loved the season, and she adored the church, festooned each year with pungent evergreen garlands and red poinsettias. To her […]
-
Check Soul
This is the season of preparation. Advent. We hear the notes of hope and expectation, but we also hear the note of repentance. John the Baptist is the wild prophetic figure who storms our lovely party of positives (as in, “Let’s keep it upbeat and positive”), with his classic one-line sermon. “Repent and believe the […]
-
When Everything That Can Go Wrong Does
In her wonderful book, Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott relates a striking story. Carolyn Myss, the medical intuitive who writes and lectures about why people don’t heal, flew to Russia a few years ago to give some lectures. Everything that could go wrong did—flights were canceled or overbooked, connections missed, her reserved room at the hotel […]