Just last night, I saw a roadside billboard advertising a local bank. It said: “Have a little fun(d) today!” Well, okay, the bankers want you to invest with them. But the slogan set...
The British comedy team Flanders and Swan sing a wonderful song about a sloth who imagines all he could be if he were a different creature. He could “win a war then write...
Life is hard. I concede the point. But life is funny too, and that is not an accident. ...
[Elijah] went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O...
I stood beside the opened trunk of my car and began to remove my jewelry, as instructed. Rings, earrings, watch, bracelets dropped...
When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?" ...
Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free ...
When my son called home to tell us he’d fallen into a cold blue funk that could only be called "depression," we weren’t totally surprised; we were, however, saddened and afraid. ...
How beautifully the essayist and social critic Henry David Thoreau speaks of the journeyer: "A traveler. I love his title. A traveler is to be revered as such. His profession is the best...
The cliché that it’s not the destination but the journey that matters is, of course, silly. If the destination didn’t matter, the journey wouldn’t either. What gives a journey its momentum—its... ...
Once at a women’s retreat I was asked to be a small group leader, and in my group was a woman from Zimbabwe: Madelyn. ...
When they heard this, they were enraged and wanted to kill them. But a Pharisee in the council named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, respected by all the people, stood up and...
Jesus told a story of a man who went out to clear the land. He uprooted gnarled old trees and chopped up rotting stumps. He put a shoulder to large boulders and pushed...
I decided that a novel I was writing would climax in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. At the...
I sit on the floor, lean against the couch, and listen to a house wrapped in the unmistakable quiet of a child asleep. The refrigerator hum blurs into the muffled drone of rush-hour...
Hilma Untinen was born October 8, 1910, in a log cabin in Northern Minnesota—the ninth of eleven children born to poor Finnish immigrants. When she was 13 years old, her mother died. Hilma’s...
They were married more than 50 years, had three grown children and two grandchildren. He remembered every one of those years to his final hour, but Parkinson’s disease and a debilitating stroke...
On the first day of classes, a new freshman walked out of the Princeton library feeling exalted by his new status and the ivied walls about him. Nearby, loafing on the grass, a...
“I grew up in a household where anger and resentment were served at every meal. In my home, love was a thing to be earned, never given. We got hugs for being good...
"Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God." —John Calvin ...
