Lord, teach me. . . .

I believe in the purpose of everything living, that taking is but the forerunner of giving; that strangers are friends that we some day may meet, and not all the bitter can equal the sweet; that creeds are but colors, and no man has said that God loves the yellow rose more than the red. –Edgar Guest Recently, we were waiting for a table at our favorite Saturday morning breakfast spot when Liam arrived with his parents. Liam is almost eleven, we learned, and tall, like his parents, with the unmistakable characteristics of a child born with Down Syndrome. The lobby was crowded; Liam’s parents maneuvered their way to the desk and gave the host a name. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, they were told. Liam stood close by his mother, looking around with wide eyes. People were watching, waiting to see how this curious child would handle the wait. (Turns out he knew just how to handle it.) Liam’s gaze fell on an older gentleman with a big, bushy mustache, seated next to...

God’s dream is that you and I and all of us will realize we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion. –Desmond Tutu This week, I did something I haven’t done for a few years. I went to church choir practice. My congregation is participating in a joint service for Good Friday, so this is a nice opportunity for me to not be the pastor and just be a choir member. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed being part of a choir, a group that works together and is so much more than the sum of its parts. We laughed, we worked hard. By the end of the night, my throat was tight and tired—but in a very good way. In everything in Life, we are each only part. Like a jigsaw puzzle with a gazillion pieces, each of us is vitally important to the Big Picture. Sometimes it can take us a while to figure out where we fit in, and sometimes—we can fit into a number of different places. When we find our place, it’s life-giving. When you spend time i...

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. . . .  Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. –John Donne It happened again. Friday, March 15, a terrorist entered a house of worship, bent on causing death and destruction. This time, the house of worship was a mosque. It was in Christchurch, New Zealand. And this terrorist killed forty-nine people as they came to pray and worship Allah. Again, the world is in shock. And again, God weeps. If anything good comes of this in the immediate aftermath, it is that for now, at least, we come together as the Kingdom Paul describes in Galatians 3, a Kingdom where there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor male nor female. All those who are descended of Abraham are together as children of the Most High, by whatever name we worship him. Every time there is a tragedy l...

When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting. –Jon Kabat-Zinn For Christians, the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist remind us of God’s intimate presence in our lives. They are sacred moments when God seems this close ; sometimes, we wish that closeness could go on forever. Jean Pierre de Caussade coined a wonderful phrase: the Sacrament of the Present Moment . This moment, this day will never come again, and God is present here, as well, in intimate ways that will never come to pass in just the same way, ever again. Every moment of every day is sacred and wonderful. When was the last time you stopped to enjoy the moment, just as it is, and be grateful? Time is sometimes compared to a flowing river. We trail our fingers through the waters or stand in it ankle-deep, but as we wander downstream, the water is not the same water we were in before. Always flowing, always advancing, never to return again—and changed by our presence therein. In th...

You can’t change what’s going on around you until you start changing what’s going on within you. --Anonymous It has been nearly twenty years now since we hosted Jorge, our foreign exchange student from Bucaramanga, Colombia. While he was with us, there were many, many problems in his country. He worried a lot about the safety of his family and friends. I asked him one time: Have you considered leaving Colombia? Coming to a new country where your children could be born in relative safety? His reply was quick and certain. He told me the same thing his father had taught him and his siblings. Jorge said many of his friends were doing just that, starting new lives in the United States or France. His father said that’s fine, if that’s what they want to do. And he could certainly understand their feelings. But from the time he was a child, Jorge’s father wisely taught him that change never comes from the outside. True, lasting change can only happen when you are comm...