A brief meditation for Lent—three times a week. Want to receive an email notification each time David posts?
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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 Some of these bus stops are even fitted with outdated advertisements and timetables—30 years outdated.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 […]
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A Choice
Jeff Schlachtenhaufen is a big-time icon for me these days. His parents are parishioners of mine, and when Jeff developed pancreatic cancer in October I got to know Jeff—though I’ve never met him in person. He lives in Chicago with his wife Susie and their four children. Jeff has a Caring Bridge website—a blog that […]
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Learning from Whitney Houston
When a “star” like Whitney Houston dies in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub, everyone is shocked. We shouldn’t be, of course. Whitney Houston, like so many stars and starlets before her, slid into drug abuse, did stints in rehab, and lived in an abusive marriage. She was hugely successful—selling over 55 million albums—but like every […]
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Every Parent Should be a Conservative and a Liberal
My father calls himself a conservative. In 1964 he voted for Barry Goldwater, and these days his car sports a big blue bumper sticker: CAIN. He is a born-again Christian who believes in the Bible and doesn’t believe in evolution. He’s a teetotaler. But I have to say, at nearly 93 my father is also […]
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The Queen’s Purse
Why does the Queen always carry that purse? A friend was telling me at brunch on Sunday that he and his wife had been honored, on a recent trip to London, to be welcomed to Buckingham Palace. They were part of a larger church group. Ken said the Queen came in and worked the […]