Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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Help Me
Hosanna! It’s the Palm Sunday shout of jubilation, or so I thought. Originally, the word meant something like “Come to our aid!” or simply, “Help us!” The Hebrew priests would chant hosanna on the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles, while they circled the altar seven times praying desperately for rain. But as the…
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Moving Maggy
Eight boxes. That’s how many they packed for their last move to a new apartment in Manhattan. Thirty boxes. That’s the number for the move three years later. On Saturday, Pam and I helped our daughter and son-in-law, Maggy and Andy, move into their new apartment in New York. After years of renting, they finally…
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“What kind of bread is this?”
Giving people communion—as any clergy will tell you—is one of the blessed gifts of ministry. People come to receive the life of God in all of their humanness. They stream to the altar, the hopeful and harried, the world-beaters and the unemployed, the believers and skeptics alike. I walk down the line and here are…
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Smile (Even if You Don’t Feel Like it)
What if the frown on your face is not the result but the cause of your unhappiness? I read it in yesterday’s paper. Doctors took a group of 75 people suffering from major depression and randomly assigned them to receive either a Botox shot in the forehead muscles that make it possible to frown, or…
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The Empty Boat
A man is having an enjoyable boat ride on a river. It is dusk. The man looks up to see another boat coming down the river toward him, and his first thought is how nice it is that someone else is out enjoying the river and the beauty of a summer’s evening. Then he realizes…
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The Heartbreak of Truth
There is an old Jewish story about the young pupil who asks the respected rabbi a question about that well-known passage in Deuteronomy 6:6. “And these words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart.” “Why is it this way?” the pupil asks. “Why are we told to put these words upon…
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My Night in Sing Sing
On Monday night I sat in the most exciting, powerful and inspirational circle I’ve experienced in years. I was conversing with convicted felons at Sing Sing prison—homicide, armed robbery, drug dealing. We sat in a classroom, maybe fifteen of us from the “outside” and ten inmates. We had come to learn more about a program…
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Narrow Your Options
Creativity is kin to spirituality. As a writer and a pastor, I am always intrigued by how the creative process—for any artist—tracks so closely the movement of the Spirit. The key to creativity, I find, also fits the lock and opens the door of the soul. And that key is: limits. Everything about our world…
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Atheists Doubt Too
Sometimes we imagine—those of us who try each day to believe—that it must be nice to be an atheist and be so sure. It must be easy, we think with some rue and a little envy, not to have to prove anything because you swear there’s nothing real beyond what you can prove. C.S. Lewis,…