by David Anderson
Cleaning out a basement closet today, I find, stuffed in a box of old sermons and random papers, a twenty-year-old photocopy of an obituary for Robert Foster Anderson. There’s a grainy picture of a man in a white cap. He looks like my Dad, but I never met him. The obit said he had a […]
by David Anderson 14 Comments Filed Under: Conflict, Family, Forgiveness, grief, Healing
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrowDon’t stop, it’ll soon be here-Fleetwood Mac Prince died without a will. So did Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Howard Hughes. Something like 64% of Americans don’t have a will, and for good reason, as I found out when we updated our wills from 29 years […]
by David Anderson 8 Comments Filed Under: Death/Dying, Discernment, Faith/Trust, Family, Now/ the Present
I think of South Dakota, the place I left on my way to college, as Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone: “The little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” But, as I found on my visit last week, time has not unremembered my old home. It’s both the same as ever, and yet dramatically […]
by David Anderson 9 Comments Filed Under: Adult Spirituality, Change, Faith/Trust, Faithfulness, Family, Fear, Letting Go, Reality--trusting it, Surrender
May 16, 2023. I kneel beside a small hole in the earth. Today is our daughter Maggy’s fortieth birthday and we have given her, according to her wish, a weeping willow to mark the occasion. Since, in a fit of spring madness, I have just planted over forty trees and bushes around our home, I […]
by David Anderson 20 Comments Filed Under: Blessing, creation, Family, Grace, Gratitude, Nature/Creation
“We love because God loved us first” (1 John 4:19). That truth is especially sublime when we hear it in Holy Week, when we watch with awe as someone embraces the whole world in love—and chooses to die rather than limiting or qualifying that love. If Jesus had recanted, if he had just admitted that, […]
by David Anderson 3 Comments Filed Under: Awareness, Change, Choice, Daily Practice, Family, Grace, Healing, Lent, Love, Surrender, Transformation
Speaking of her early stage of faith, writer and retreat leader Paula D’Arcy shared a dream in which the kitchen table of her childhood disappeared. That table symbolized the beautiful security of her early years. It was the heart of her childhood home, where she learned her Baltimore Catechism, mastered every question, and came to […]
by David Anderson 4 Comments Filed Under: Adult Spirituality, Belief, Change, Faith/Trust, Family, Lent, Letting Go, Reality--trusting it, Surrender
Jesus did not try to change one person. He certainly didn’t set out to change the world. We hear a lot these days about “theory of change.” It’s a term in non-profit, philanthropy and development that describes the organization’s goal of social change and the step-by-step process for achieving it. I’m sure it does all […]
by David Anderson 6 Comments Filed Under: Awareness, Change, Family, Grace, Lent, Transformation
A few weeks before her mother died, my wife Pam discovered that her mother had been married—and divorced—before she met and married Pam’s father. It was a shock to Pam because, as an only child, she wondered how her mother could have withheld the story of her life. And then, of course, in the light […]
by David Anderson 10 Comments Filed Under: Awareness, Character, Family, Identity, Intimacy, Lent