Two days ago, I opened the pantry cupboard in our kitchen and broke into a cold sweat. This may not seem a normal response, but just after Easter next April, my husband and I will leave Denver for his sabbatical – three months of sabbath rest and renewal followed by a month of vacation. Our …
A wise mentor once gently informed my (highly anxious) younger self that ministry is a lot like the parable of the sower and the seed in scripture. She reminded me that I can scatter seeds with wild abandon, but I should not expect to be any more successful than Farmer G-d. Some seeds will grow …
Our travels have brought us to Mesa Verde, one of the truly extraordinary landscapes of the United States. Indeed, it is more than a piece of North American geography and history; it is a World Heritage Site. Our guide explained the World Heritage designation comes not from Mesa Verde’s past, but from the fact that …
Even though, chronologically, I am past the summer quarter of my life, each year continues to have its cycle of seasons. In his book, Naked Spirituality, Brian McLaren calls spiritual summer (the inward Beltane), The Season of Complexity. It is a season of mastering skills, achieving goals, and conquering challenges (maturing and ripening). As with …
This year, because independently cycling calendars do occasionally coincide, the Jewish and Christian faith communities have the relatively unusual synchronicity of Passover falling in the week before Easter (at the time it fell prior to Jesus’ actual death), and both the Eastern and the Western branches of the Christian Church celebrating Easter on the same …
I’ve been pondering success lately. As friends and colleagues move into retirement or pre-retirement planning (indeed, as my husband and I begin to consider the shift in life stages), I’ve been pondering how those I know, those I love, measure success. I was talking with my father recently about what he and my mother taught …
In the west, the issue of water runs just beneath the surface of our lives. Or, increasingly, is being drained away, insuring that much of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and northern Mexico will be a wasteland in two or three more generations. Already the Colorado River ends miles north of where it flowed only …