Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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The Lorica of St. Patrick
As the world celebrates St. Patrick’s day, we pause to remember Ireland’s great patron who has been adopted by the world. Born in Roman Britain, kidnapped by slave traders from Ireland prowling the Welsh coastline, enslaved for years as a shepherd in Ireland, Patrick had no formal education, but his searing experience created within him…
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What the Greyhound Finally Discovered
Everybody is chasing some prize. What’s yours? What are you chasing? It’s worth sitting for a moment and thinking about that, because most people live their whole lives feverishly pursuing something they’ve never actually named. Feverish pursuits, by their very nature, preclude reflection. It’s all happening so fast we don’t have time—who has time to…
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Staying Home–For Fear
If like me you loved to read Shel Silverstein to your kids (or you’re lucky enough to be doing it now), you remember “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and “The Giving Tree.” Here’s another Silverstein poem I found, one I didn’t know. It’s a riff on the Pied Piper myth. It’s a poem about staying home—for…
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The Father I Want to Become
This is me and my father. It looks like he is sitting in my lap, but actually he is sitting on a chair, and I am kneeling beside him. We were all of us there, my six brothers and sisters, for his 93rd birthday. We ordered pizza (it’s the birthday dinner he chooses every…
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Sending Up My Timber
My daughter Sharon, who’s studying for the ministry at Yale Divinity School (one proud father I am!), told me this week about a great sermon she’d heard by an old Baptist preacher. “He spoke about the quiet people,” Sharon wrote. “The folks who sit at church and don’t make a big fuss over themselves, the…
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A Beautiful Brain
A mother was asking me the other day for resources on how to talk to her six year-old son about death. It wasn’t that a family member had died—or the family dog had. The boy was playing violent video games on play dates (“I don’t allow them in our home” she said), and he came…
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Imitation Bus Stop
When I read this I was intrigued. “In Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany, some nursing homes build false, imitation bus stops for their patients who are suffering from dementia. Some of these bus stops are even fitted with outdated advertisements and timetables—30 years outdated. The patients will sit at the bus stop waiting…
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The Only Sin
This is Ash Wednesday. If you darken the door of a church today—or even if you read the paper or the news online—you’ll hear about “sin.” That’s what Christians are repenting of today. Which is true, it’s just that there is a great big ironic problem which would be comic if it were not so…
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Spiritual Wisdom from Procter & Gamble
Why is it that you can’t smell what you can’t smell? Consider: In the mid-90’s Procter & Gamble began a secret project to create a product that would eliminate bad odors. They spent millions developing a colorless liquid that could be sprayed on anything malodorous—and it worked. The product was called Febreze. After making this…