advent journal
repeating myself if someone says they are going through the motions we take it to mean the motions are meaningless acts of resignation things we can do in our sleep but I would suggest that the story is not so simple the motions are memories or at least they hold
advent journal
measured existence I can measure a cup of flour, pour a pound of sugar but I am at a loss to quantify how much grief weighs how long a heart stays bro- ken how far it is to forgiveness or the speed of the sound of loneliness I cannot serve
advent journal
I have no idea how long Guilford has hosted a tree lighting on the Green, but we have managed to be there with several hundred of our closest neighbors for all but one of the seven Christmases we have been in town, the one exception being 2020. You remember 2020.
advent journal
Here is a story I haven’t told in a while. In December of 1983 I was working as a chaplain at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. My roommate, Bruce Reece, owned the condo we shared in North Dallas--well, then it was North Dallas; now it is almost downtown.
advent journal
catching a breath in the small town where we lived before this one one of the houses on our way home filled their yard with inflatable Christmas things Santa snowmen reindeer to name a few each was filled with air and light and made their corner lot the beacon of
advent journal
For the Advent season, I am returning to a book I have not finished--The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. The nearly five hundred page book is an expansive collection of essays and poems intended to inspire us “to
advent journal
good time the fallacy of the interstate is that what matters most is getting there the highway knows no place we are nowhere other than traveling yet every exit offers the chance to face the truth of places and faces that are more than drive-bys a reason to remember there
advent journal
Ginger, Rachel, the pups and I spent the better part of this first day of Advent traveling from Durham, North Carolina, where we spent Thanksgiving, to Baltimore, our halfway stop on the way back to Guilford. We were on the road with several thousand travelers, both coming and going from
poetry
running out of daylight it’s not that the night bothers me I find comfort in the way the dark wraps itself around lamps and light bulbs like a custom fit suit I love the deep expanse of the night sky reminding me that there will always be more than
recipes
I had a rare opportunity this week to a part of Project PX, an amazing program sponsored by St. Luke’s UMC in Houston. My friend Sid Davis asked me to come do a house reading and concert on Saturday and then connected me with Meredith Davis, his daughter, who
poetry
the funeral of reasonable expectations you would think a funeral would be more quiet the din makes it difficult to discern my emotions in these days of venom and vitriol or know what dreams have a chance of survival how then do we hope when so many seem so committed
poetry
banana pudding cookies I was invited by my friend Taylor Davis to be a part of an All Saints celebration at his church. During the past year, they have experienced a season of profound grief that included the deaths of two of their pastors. Taylor asked me to come and