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The Wall

It’s time, again, to go out.  Out beyond the known walls.  This has meant so much more than a Sunday change.  It’s about hearing new voices, meeting and listening to new people, reading new authors, engaging and participating: not as one with an agenda but as one who has a lot to learn.

I could have written this as a 21-year old finishing college, and I daresay I did. I went off my security grid and into a gritty part of LA, listening to lives as different from my own as I could imagine.  Teens in the neighborhood didn’t give a damn about Continue reading “The Wall”

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Living the Painting: Advent Week Four

If the Return of the Prodigal Son were a theater production, which part would I audition for?  After spending Advent immersed in the story, I know I could play either son well.  But do I have what it takes to play the father?

I set out on this writing project without knowing it would end where it started:    Continue reading “Living the Painting: Advent Week Four”

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Child Again: Advent Week Two

The prodigal son was once an innocent child, and then he wasn’t.  And now he wants to be again.

Last week‘s Advent focused on Hope by sitting with the Father on the porch, “actively waiting for that moment when the child turns home.”  This week I’m inviting myself to return home with the son, who like the second week of Advent, is yearning for Peace.  I’m spending time with Rembrandt’s painting and Nouwen’s book to cast new light on my favorite parable.

The prodigal son was a child, a young man, who declared in the most dramatic way, “Myself.” My daughter as a toddler would pull Continue reading “Child Again: Advent Week Two”

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The Half-life of Reform

Walking westward, finally closing in on the spires guiding me like the Bethlehem star, I was in for a disappointing surprise…

“I keep thinking what good wine and beer I have at home as well as a beautiful wife, or should I say boss?”  Cranach-Luther

The town of Wittenberg is a thousand years old, but took nearly half that time to produce the famous reformer who wrote this about his wife.  The half millennia since have seen Martin Luther’s thinking spread worldwide, including the little church in Florida via Scotland where it set the tone for my upbringing.  By that time Continue reading “The Half-life of Reform”