Today’s your birthday. Just one day.Just one day. That’s all it is. Just one day. That’s all it took. Just one day. To take you from us. Just one day. And a lifetime is gone. In just one day. Today, 16 January 2025, is Mack’s 21st birthday. Or would be, if […]
Life
222 posts
This is an entry in the “Acrostic Contemplations.” Knowledge is a flexible term. In some languages, like German, you can have several different words which all track to a single, meager, “to know” in English. You might know a person at work, you can know a fact about the world, […]
This is an entry in the “Acrostic Contemplations.” Rather than the love of money, it is perhaps the lack of contentment, the ability to be satisfied with what one has, that is the root of most evils. Why else do we yearn for more money than because we are unsatisfied […]
Fowl Language is a panel comic by Brian Gordon that usually focuses upon the challenges of parenthood…through ducks. It seems that, in the world of the comic, if not Gordon’s own life, grief has arrived as the father’s mother is nearing her end. His last two comics are wonderful and […]
My back was sore as I scrambled off the floor and the pile of wrapped presents to slide onto the couch and pick up my glass of port. I stretched and observed to Elizabeth that it has been a really challenging fall. There were three main challenges that I had […]
Those of us who grieve loved ones who are no longer with us view All Saints’ Eve and All Saints’ Day in a different way. We remember those who have gone before us, often too soon, and we try and do so in hope. The resurrection is that hope, “the […]
I posted this on Facebook earlier in the week. The account will remain open, but moribund. As I conclude, how nice it would be to go back to the days when we had robust discussion through our “Biblioblogs.” I opened my account on Facebook in September of 2004, shortly after […]
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Christian Struggle with Suffering, Grief, and Hope. My father died on Maundy Thursday 2019. As my mother and I sat by my father’s bed in the ICU, we began to talk about plans for his funeral—not […]
Sometimes Facebook can be really good and useful and at other times it can be the means of real harm. In this time of COVID-Crisis it has become a place for friends and family to gather together, churches (like Good Shepherd) to broadcast their services, and for connections to be […]
Two weeks ago, as part of Good Shepherd’s “Calming the Storm” series of essays, my friend Mark Medley’s essay “The Psalter and the Mystic” reminded us of Julian of Norwich. He talked about the challenges she faced in her own life when she and her community many times faced plagues. […]