Pressed Down and Running Over

We all know how good it feels to be grateful. Someone has done something thoughtful for us, or we’ve reached a big goal, had a big moment, or felt a sweeping sense of beauty and awe come over us. Something deep inside whispers or says or shouts, “Thanks!” There is usually a smile on our […]

The Transforming Presence

This week is the third Sunday of our three-week series on the promise of prayer. I’m surprised to find that as we come to the end of this time, I feel like we’re really only just beginning to scratch the surface of the topic. We talked the first week about George Fox’s struggle with despair […]

Marco Polo, God’s Way

When you were a kid at the pool in the summer, did you ever play the game Marco Polo? It’s really fun if you have a few friends with you and it’s even more fun if it’s a hot and beautiful day and the pool is crowded, because then you can all scatter in different […]

The Promise of Prayer

It’s good to be back with you this morning, Friends. I wish I could tell you exactly what I did on my very-relaxing-and-wonderful vacation last week, but I have to admit it’s a bit of a blur now. The main thing I remember is that there was a lot of quiet, a lot of peace, […]

Preparing for Peace

I had planned all sorts of things for this message this morning, as I anticipated having a whole delicious week off with no surgery, no recovery, and no “have tos” planned. The whole week stretched before me and my only intention was to spend time quietly with God, keeping my heart and mind open, awake […]

The Difference of Devotion

The kids and I had dinner with my 94-year-old stepdad last night. He’s doing well, still full of stories, kind, and hopeful. As we all shared pizza, I was reminded yet again that no matter how old we all get, he will always do those dad things he’s always done: recommending things he thinks we […]

The Lord Who Heals

We don’t have to look far in our lives to know that God cares about healing. Everything that has life has the capacity to grow, adjust, and repair itself. This happens within individuals and within communities across species. Trees in a forest share nourishment with other trees that are struggling. Plants have immune systems that […]

Finding a Balance

The week before last at the hospital I gave two workshops on, “Responding to Stress with Creativity and Kindness,” and that’s had me thinking about the importance of balance ever since. Over the last couple of decades, we’ve learned more and more about what living with stress can do to us, inside and out. That’s […]

Gardening Thoughts

One evening this week, I was outside puttering in the garden, when I noticed that one of my rose bushes looked stressed. There were chipmunk holes in the soil around its roots—and that would be upsetting enough—but the leaves also had been chewed on and were thinning on the branches. There were some buds forming […]

Moment by Moment

At precisely 11:40 this morning, I will turn 60 years old. Right now I am enjoying the last little bit of my 59th year. But when that moment rolls around, I begin a whole new year, a whole new decade, filled entirely with whole new experiences. Tiny moments like that are so plentiful in our […]

To an Unknown God

What do you think it means to be “holy”? In this day and age, when so many folks in our popular culture compete for attention in the media, when loud and fast and explosive are considered values somehow, the word holy may seem outdated, old-fashioned, unreachable. If you look up the definition of holy, you’ll […]

Snapshots of Mom

This week I heard something on the radio that I think has been a long time coming. Companies large and small—from chocolate companies to homemade crafts to travel businesses—have started giving people the option of “opting out” of Mother’s Day promotions, recognizing that after an unthinkable amount of loss in a pandemic year, many people […]

Clothed by God

Yesterday was such a beautiful day–it felt like perfection. Warm sun, cool breeze, birds singing everywhere, flowers blossoming, trees greening up, lovely sky—clouds high and wispy against a brilliant blue sky. Don’t you imagine that was just the kind of weather Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden of Eden? It wouldn’t have been too […]

No Feeling Is Final

It’s no secret that we are emotional beings. We experience our world—we connect with and participate in the life around us—by feeling it. When we see a beautiful sunset, for example, we don’t just look at it with our eyes and think, intellectually, oh wow that’s really pretty. We feel it in our bodies as […]

In Reach of Wisdom

For the past two weeks I’ve been reading a book about mindfulness called, Relax and Be Aware. The ideas it contains are at the same time, simple and clear as well as profoundly deep and challenging. The author teaches meditation at a center in Myanmar (me-yan-mar) and in his book, he invites readers to become […]

This Is the Moment

One day this week, early in the morning, I was starting my drive in to the hospital, when I noticed that seemingly overnight, all the Bradford pear trees in my neighborhood had burst into full bloom. They’d started the process several days before—first showing small hints of white blossoms and then beginning to spread flowers […]

But Wait, There’s More

This is a day for celebrating. Wherever we’ve been, whatever we’ve been dealing with, for this moment, the rock of COVID-19 has been rolled away and here we are again together at long last! God’s light and love has once again led us out of our closed off places, ending the long season of isolation […]

Real Power

PALM SUNDAY Today our scripture is based on one of my favorite stories about Jesus: The Triumphal Entry. I’m not sure why I love it so much, except that it is such a pinnacle moment for Jesus, such a cinematic scene, filled with color and movement, celebration and joy. It is a high point in […]

Life’s Soundtrack

You may have noticed that now that the days are getting warmer, the birds are back in the mornings. And I’m not talking about one or two lonely birds with thin, warbly voices, braving the cold to offer their thin, pure melodies. I’m talked about rich and riotous songs of all kinds—cardinals and robins and […]

Grace for a Rough Road

Often when people hear about the work I do at hospice—and this is true for other people on my team as well—the person says, “Oh, I don’t know how you do it. It must be so depressing.” I can understand why someone who hasn’t been part of hospice work to think that. After all, I […]

If Thine Eye Be Single

Whether you were born into a family of Friends or became a convinced Friend later in life, you know that there are some things about our tradition that make us different from other Protestant denominations. First and most obvious is that we don’t do communion in the same way that other Christian churches do; for […]

In the Blossoming of Time

Yesterday was such a beautiful day! Even while the snow was still slowly melting along the tree line in my backyard, I was out looking at the garden beds, making mental plans for spring cleaning and planting, likely just weeks away. I so easily slipped into the future, seeing the garden full of healthy and […]

Into the Wilderness

How good are you at being quiet? And for how long? Can you turn off your phone, turn off the television, and spend time just being available for whatever God wants to say in the silence, inside and outside of you? If you’re like most people today, it might not be long before you start […]

To Love Truly

We each have, tucked away in our hearts, memories of extra special moments throughout our lives when we felt especially loved. In fact, it’s a wonderful thing to do, once in a while—an exercise that’s good for our heart and our hope–to revisit those moments in our lives, starting from the time we were very […]

The Power of Presence

Today’s message is about the power of example and the way our lives speak—knowingly or not, and for good or for ill—into the lives of others. We never really know when our actions will leave a lasting impact on someone else. It might be the time we helped someone pick up a bag of groceries […]

Opening, Again, to Joy

Many years ago, when my children were small and we lived together in a big limestone farmhouse in Columbus, Indiana, I was living a busy and often stressful life. I was a self-employed writer with a small business and juggling a busy household and school activities with deadlines, editors, and more. It was often my […]

Our Part in Peace

Memories are such funny things. This week, out of the blue, I remembered a moment from more than 30 years ago that became the seed for this morning’s message. My brother John had come to visit when I was living in Brown County, and we were having coffee in the kitchen that morning when he […]

Remembering Prayer

I imagine that you are, like I am, still processing and trying to understand the events of the last couple of weeks in our country. Our souls were shocked to see such violence and disrespect—disregard for the well-being of people and traditions and institutions. And we are still on edge as we hear about safety […]

The World We Want

Friends, this has been a heartbreaking week. As the daily death toll of COVID-19 surpassed previous records and hospitals across the country reported being overwhelmed and out of beds, we watched horror-stricken and helpless as violence, chaos, and unchecked rage boiled over in our nation’s capital, defacing one of our democracy’s most sacred places, threatening […]

Toddler Jesus

My favorite Far Side cartoon—which I found probably 15 or 20 years ago—shows a young boy sitting at a table, with feathers in the air all around him and soot on his face, like there was an explosion, the result of an obvious science experiment gone wrong. The caption says, “God as a kid tries […]

Choose Well

Well, Friends, here we are at the end of a very long, very challenging, and for far too many, a very painful year. 2020 has brought hardships on just about every level you can imagine—physical, emotional, occupational, financial, and relational. All across the country and around the world, we have lost loved ones, we’ve lost […]

A New Chance to Love

Well no matter how much we plan or hope or buy, Christmas this year—in 2020—is destined to be a Christmas like no other. We’ve already had 10 months of unexpected and trying circumstances, and now, as Christmas grows close, the pandemic is impacting even our best-loved traditions. The family events that are such a big […]

Mary’s Miraculous Hope

This week, as we travel together through the Advent season, getting continually closer to the stable in Bethlehem, we lit the pink candle in our Advent wreath. It represents Mary’s important part in the unfolding of grace in our world. The message is one of hope—hope that lifts our eyes when all seems dark, hope […]

A Humble Quiet

Today is the second Sunday of the Advent season, a time of holy waiting as we pray and watch for the rebirth of Christ’s light in a world that so sorely needs it. Our responsive reading today—written so beautifully by Bill Medlin many years ago—points us toward God’s desire that we live in peace in […]

The Work of the Light

Yesterday was such a beautiful gift of a day. After so many days of rain this week, yesterday dawned cloudless as the sun rose in a clear blue sky. As morning moved toward afternoon, the sunlight just poured in all the windows along the southern side of my house—I love that!–it floods the sunroom, spreads […]

Thankful Anyway

I think it’s safe to say that this year is unfolding in ways none of us expected. Each New Year’s Eve—I may have told you this before—I have a tradition of doing a kind of prayerful vision board for the coming year, an exercise in opening to the blessing and adventure that God is sure […]

Ready, Set, Rest!

You probably already know this about me, but I can be a pretty wordy person. Give me a topic and I’ll have something to say or write about it: some thought, some perspective, some possibility, some plan. During my recovery time these last couple of weeks, I’m surprised to report that my inner world got […]

Unique and Precious

Here in central Indiana, we are having one of the most beautiful falls I can remember. And that follows an unusually perfect and balanced summer in which we experienced no drought, only short stretches of humidity, and surprisingly few storms and tornado warnings. How kind of God to turn up the dial on beauty and […]

A Simple Love

Those of you on our Wednesday night Zoom call heard me describe the events of last Sunday—Christopher and Ashley’s wedding—as one of the five best days of my life. All week I feel I’ve been floating along, buoyed by the love and magic of that day. There really is something to the idea that moments […]

Doing the Best We Can

If someone had told you last fall that by the end of the first week of October in 2020, you would have been in your house for roughly eight months, missed out on all your favorite events, like festivals and fairs and sporting events and concerts, that you’d would be sitting at home this morning […]

Getting Real

Has anyone ever told you to “get real”? Usually this phrase gets tossed into a conversation when one person thinks the other is being unrealistic, perhaps hoping for an outcome that is unlikely to happen. Getting real means opening our eyes to the truth and being willing to see what’s really there. The Cambridge Dictionary […]

Cuts, Jinx, and Do-Overs

This morning’s message is a message about forgiveness. I wanted it to be a simple, light-hearted look at how easy forgiveness can be…how gently we can look past things that offend us in others to preserve a sense of harmony with one another in the name of love. With so much worry, so much heartbreak, […]

The Economy of God

Have you ever noticed that we are literally surrounded by an abundance of beauty each day? Who knows the number of petals on a single rose? Or the total count of trees in a lush, green forest. How many light-filled—and sometimes rain-filled—clouds cross the sky each day over our heads and houses? Who could count […]

Down the Mountain

One of the great joys of working with hospice is that I get to hear so many wonderful stories of peoples’ lives—the blessings they’ve experienced, the places they’ve seen, the love that has surrounded them. One patient I saw regularly told beautiful stories of a love-and-fun-filled childhood, growing up in the mountains of West Virginia. […]

The Risk of Hope

This week, hope has been on my mind. Hope of better things. Hope of kinder days. Hope of justice, respect, compassion, quality of life. Hope that things will turn out okay, for us all. In particular, I’ve been hoping that the newborn baby finches in our aviary at hospice will all make it successfully through […]

A Matter of Will

This year I took a simplified approach to my gardening because I knew it was going to be a busy summer. I bought the plants and seeds; I drew out a plan. I got everything in the ground in mid-May, when the soil dried out enough for planting. Of the three raised garden beds I […]

What Love Will Do

I’m going to start our message today with a confession. Most weekday nights last week, as the PBS Newshour signed off the air, I found myself standing about five feet from my television, watching intently, usually in tears. My heart was deeply touched by the stories anchor Judy Woodruff tells at end of the newscast […]

The Saints Next Door

The title of our message today—and the idea behind it—comes to us a courtesy of a tweet from Pope Francis. Early on Monday, he sent out a message, saying: “Let’s look at the ‘saints next door’ who, with simplicity, respond to evil with good, have the courage to love their enemies and to pray for […]

An Innocent Faith

Fifteen years ago I was working as a chaplain at St. Vincent Hospital and I was on call one weekend when I was paged by a nurse in the emergency room. They had just had a death—a woman in cardiac arrest—and her son, a cognitively challenged adult who functioned at about the level of a […]

Just Wondering

One evening last week I had the television on while I was doing something on the computer, and the British drama Grantchester was on in the background. The show is about an Anglican clergyman in Grantchester, England, who finds himself swept into all sorts of mysteries and mayhem. I watched it years ago in the […]