A prayer for the seventh Sunday of Easter

God. We don’t want fiery ordeals. We don’t want any ordeals, actually. We don’t want to be anxious, we don’t want to be tested, we don’t want to have to be alert, we don’t want you to be gone.Because we like to believe that if you knew what was going on, you would fix it.If […]

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Rethinking the list.

I read the other day about monotasking as opposed to multitasking. It’s the idea of doing one thing at a time. But when I think about that, or the idea of making a list of the three things I need to get done in a day, I always think about things that need to get […]

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Care With Words

Rich Dixon has an important language lesson. +++ I read an interesting story recently. Distilling out many details, it went like this: A man stood at a whiteboard and wrote five sentences. #1. John beat Mary. Active voice – clear about who did what to whom. #2. Mary was beaten by John. Do you see […]

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Welcome little children.

The disciples are sitting on benches against the wall, on the floor, on stools. As Jesus talks, a child is by their mother, at the edges, in the shadows. Jesus catches the child’s attention and points to a small space on the bench between James and John. Maybe they were the child’s uncles. Or family […]

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We told him to stop

“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” It was a statement, not a question. John was telling Jesus about the loyalty of the disciples, of their commitment to protect the identity of this small group known as […]

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