Lord, teach me. . . .

Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday. –Napoleon Hill I’m not usually too bad about procrastinating. I usually putter around a bit, but with the understanding that while I putter, I am organizing my To Do List of the mind. Yeah, that’s it. As we prepare for a vacation, for instance, I know we’ll need to pack stuff. I know we need one last trip to the grocery store for road food. (When the kids were little, we always took along a bag of suckies [hard candies] and chewies [soft candies]. That way, no one complained.) And yes, I know eventually, we will need to give the house one last cleaning. I really don’t like coming home to a dirty house. But for now . . . I am content to do just about anything else. I have one more sermon to craft—but before I start that . . . and then, suddenly, it’s Friday. But along the way of my doing other things, I have made time for a walk. And I saw baby bi...

  Prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God. –Saint Teresa of Avila   As if the pandemic weren’t challenging enough . . . on top of everything else, the United States Postal Service was also adding to the challenges of everyday life. Mailboxes in neighborhoods were removed. Letters and packages were delayed. Local post offices, in some cases, had reduced staffing as some folks retired but weren’t replaced. Suddenly, mailing a letter might take three days instead of one day. Packages headed for Colorado or Montana suddenly weren’t guaranteed to arrive by the necessary date—even at Christmas! It’s been frustrating, to say the least. Then I had an epiphany. Our postal service has become a microcosm of God’s kingdom way when it comes to answering our prayers. Sometimes, we pray earnestly, and it seems as if almost immediately there is an answer. Even some of those strange prayers, ones that we offered in quivering, uncertain voices, seem to be o...

  If you go around being afraid, you’re never going to enjoy life. You have only one chance, so you’ve got to have fun. –Lindsey Vonn   When I was around 9 or 10 years old, our summer vacation took us to Hovenweep National Monument. Hovenweep sits in the Four Corners area, with tentacles in both Colorado and Utah. The monument celebrates the history of over twenty-five ancient peoples who dwelt in this hot, dry land, over 10,000 years ago. It’s unlike anywhere else. There is a very primitive campground there, and we had our tent to pitch. Problem was, the ground was so hard and so dry, Dad couldn’t drive the stakes in as well as he would have liked. So he set the tent up, and we unrolled the sleeping bags, crawled in and used our body weight to hold it down. Then the winds came . . . and the rains. . . . It was a long, scary night, but joy did, indeed, come in the morning. The sun came up, just like every other day. We survived, obviously. But even while we knew ,...