Two years ago I took a month long sabbatical from work, ministry, meetings, and email. It was a fabulous month and good for my soul.
Just before that month began, a friend recommended that I read Sabbath: The Ancient Practices
A few weeks ago I boarded a flight and realized that I had no book to read. I found Sabbath on my iPad and began reading. It …
Been awhile since I wrote anything, so wanted to share a simple insight into prayer.
There are many types of prayer — far too many to list here. But I want to focus on two approaches that seem common … and sometimes misused.
1) The prayer time that is a sanctuary. It’s a place to retreat and disengage from the world. Prayer becomes a sanctuary, a place to avoid pain, a place to find peace, a place to heal. It’s the place to go when life seems confusing. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that it can also become a …
Admittedly I’m cheating a bit here. This isn’t really a book. At least not originally. Like my first entry about Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip. But if you took all the Calvin strips I read over the years it would fill a three book volume. I know, because I have all three next to me here in my home office.
And oh my, what a comic strip it was when it was being regularly published. Bill Watterson captured the essence of childhood with the witty, cynical, adventure seeking little boy called Calvin and his stuffed tiger …
Came across this in Celtic Daily Prayer today and thought I’d share it. Strikes me as the kind of insight we could all use, especially when dealing with hardship. We want to turn those moments into “spiritual warfare” issues all too fast sometimes.
“When things seem really bad, we might need to hesitate before assuming it’s against us or out to get us. As Gamaliel pointed out, we need to be careful just in case it’s God we’d be fighting in rejecting it.”
A few weeks ago I had dinner with friends and we ended up talking politics. Though we were not really that far apart in our viewpoints, the disagreements were enough to create a true debate. These were good friends, so there was plenty of laughter and teasing. Accusations went back and forth but they were always done with a smile. Still, there were serious disagreements about policies and perspectives.
That’s going to happen a lot during this election season. Good people with informed viewpoints see things differently. That’s life. And that’s a democracy, thank God.
Of course, it can go …
Can you believe Fall is here? It’s nearly the end of September and it was a great summer. Thought I’d share my reading list of the past three months. Most of the books are about history, business, spiritual development, or perhaps what I call summerish. Is that a word? But you know what I mean: books that make for good reading while sitting by a pool. Not that I did a lot of that, unfortunately.
Anyway, here is the list. Each is a link to my review or to the Amazon page where it is sold. If I didn’t do …
Did the title of this post make you uncomfortable? Well, me too. But this post is not as creepy as you might at first guess. It’s actually a book review, though the topic of the book will make everybody feel a bit uncomfortable.
Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil
Mueller starts in Italy and explores …
This is our first harvest here in our new vineyard home. Seems appropriate to share these photos, plus one short video at the end (which is hard to see…sorry!). The work started in the late afternoon and continued throughout the evening.
Finally, here’s a 12-second video. It’s not much…taken with just an iPhone, from a distance, at night. But it gives you some idea of the noise and energy happening in the vineyard. If you subscribe to this blog via email and can’t see it, just click here to watch.
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