“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 of the kitchen crew came from the United Kingdom….
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 music for our small group…
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 like—total failure. I started dipping my toes in the water…
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 just how impossible it is…
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 was the first mass we’d ever…
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 to make room for everyone in the kitchen. The…
“’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 that day…
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 experience what Jesus felt…