My childhood was basically a highlight reel of orthopedic mishaps. Back then, a scraped knee from a bike fall, a knot on the head from an ambitious expedition, or a fall from a tree usually just meant a quick patch-up from Mom and a stern, “Be a little more careful!” before I was off on…

Read More

Places can become part of us, can imprint themselves on the soul like people we have loved. Because every place is part of a larger landscape, a cell in the body of the world, to fall in love with any one place — to contact its beckoning beauty, its vulnerability, its variousness — is to…

Read More

It’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality. — Ray Bradbury. Yesterday, I wrote about my anniversary, but like the day after my wedding day fifty-four years ago, a marriage really begins the following day. In the reality of building a life together. Ray Bradbury’s  observation, encapsulates a…

Read More

I know every bird in the sky, and the creatures in the field are in my sight. – Psalm 50:11. This verse, and others like it, often brings me back to what I believe to be a truth: the idea that God knows us intimately, deeply, and completely. When I was a boy, this omnipotence was…

Read More

And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit…. –– Mark 4:20. Sometimes, the true “word” comes to us not in a sanctuary but in the sound of a story, told by a friend, on a quiet afternoon. My friend Anne has a way of…

Read More