“Say it again,” they urged me. I felt like an animal in a cage, surrounded by the watchful eyes of gleeful children who poked at its helpless form with a stick. My fellow college-aged camp counselors hailed mostly from Canada and the Northeastern United States. Much...
I focused on the end of my fingertip, where it met circuitous lines on the crackled pink paper. I tried not to look ahead and how much of the journey remained but centered my attention on where I was on the path in that moment. The pastor played gentle background...
Spinning thoughts felt like a whirlpool crashing in my mind, threatening to pull me under. I fidgeted and ached for the relief of the alarm signaling 20 minutes had finally passed. For years, this has been what my sporadic attempts at contemplative prayer have felt...
We love our boxes. They are handy compartments for our ideas and thoughts. They keep life simpler when we can put people into tidy categories that make sense to us. I traveled to half a dozen countries and lived in three outside my own before I really began to see...
We couldn’t understand but a few words of the mass but the beautiful, flowing Arabic was music to our ears, rising up to the heavens along with the sweet-smelling incense. Not only was the language new to our ears, having only studied it for a couple months, but this...
The holidays have always been a time of togetherness and feasting for my family. When crispness enters the air, bringing relief from the stifling Georgia summer, my mind turns to standing in my mom’s kitchen and making noodles or pound cake, pulling out the card table...
“’The day will come', says the Lord 'when I will do for Israel and Judah all the good things I have promised them. In those days and at that time I will raise up a righteous descendant from King David’s line. He will do what is just and right throughout the land. In...
I stood surrounded by stone on all sides, elbow to elbow with others inside the small stone room. The pit. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it felt like to be in this dungeon alone, in complete darkness. I shuddered and opened them again. I didn’t want to...
After a day of rest, Thursday of Holy Week was a full, pivotal day in the life and death of Jesus. The Gospel of John summarizes the beginning of Holy Week in one chapter (John 12) but devotes five and a half chapters to Thursday. Jesus shared the Passover (the Last...
When I was young my grandma called it, “going home.” We would pile books and our pillows into the backseat and watch cities and farms go by on our nine hour drive from Georgia to the small-town in Indiana where my grandparents grew up. I visited cousins and went from...
