Friday Soul Food: Fall Photography in Vermont
Something a little out of the ordinary. No hillside blazing with color or white church steeple interjecting itself among the orange leaves. One hour on one acre (mostly on my knees) with my Canon 7D, macro lens, and a tripod. OK. I admit it. This last flower wasn't...
Friday Soul Food: Stopping to See
I often go through my days barely stopping to eat or catch my breath. Too much to do. Mostly good things but my tendency is to cram a 20 hour agenda into my 16 awake hours. Making photos like these forces me to stop. Forces me to look—and hopefully to actually see....
Friday Soul Food: Beauty’s Invitation
I am amazed by the beauty of this season—from the majestic maples, to the tiny nasturtiums. Regardless of whether or not you consider yourself a person of faith, beauty transports us, up and out of the mundane, up and out of the pain into something bigger. Something...
Seismic Shifts: How Marriage Causes Internal Earthquakes & Why That’s Good
“Love is an earthquake meant to relocate the center of our universe,” writes Mike Mason in his brilliant book, The Mystery of Marriage. I wish I had known that this was to be expected. During our first decade of marriage, the tectonic plates shifted and pitched me off...
Friday Soul Food: Jen Michel’s Teach Us to Want and the Conversion of Our Desires
What do you want? As in, what do you really want? This is a combustible question. Jen Michel writes in Teach Us to Want, “I am a woman who has struggled long with an inordinate fear of her selfishness, a woman who has wanted a measure of certainty for finding and...
Littleton MA 300th Birthday Parade
Yes, it was hot!
Friday Soul Food: Mothering Like a Warrior
If ezer, the Hebrew word used to describe Eve, literally means strong rescuer, being a mother and being an ezer have often felt mutually exclusive. Changing diapers, settling sibling arguments, teaching my sons to read are all important but definitely not on par with...
Feed Your Enemies: A Scriptural Call to Overcome Our Divisive Instincts
There’s a curious sentence in Psalm 23 that unsettles me. David writes, “You prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies.” In the same passage where the king presents God as the Good Shepherd and celebrates his provision, he throws in this radical...
Friday Soul Food: Caring for the Least of These — Incarcerated Youth
Near the end of Jesus’ ministry on earth, he tells a crowd, Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave...
#PRAYvsEbola@10
West Equatorial Africa needs our help. To date, more than 2,218 individuals in three countries have lost their lives to the Ebola outbreak. Several weeks ago, the director of the World Health Organization warned that 20,000 more people could be infected if an...