psalms – Page 7 – 300 words a day

more than watchmen waiting.

You are waiting. You aren’t sure what’s happening. You can’t see to the end of today. And you are waiting. It reminds you of that summer before your senior year of high school, the summer that you worked third shift. All alone in the building, all alone working on the computer. Sometimes alone is okay. […]

by Jon Swanson

But sometimes it’s hard to go to church.

Responding to this survey, one of you asked: What do you do if you don’t like to go to church on Sunday mornings? What do you do if every time you try and go to church the service makes you cry so you get embarrassed and don’t go back? What do you do if someone […]

by Jon Swanson

Psalm 6

It happens all the time in songs (and in stories.) For the first two verses, everything is bad. And then the hero comes, the story turns, the cavalry arrives, the light dawns. We love to read these stories, to sing these songs, because they give us hope. The first two verses are exactly where we […]

by Jon Swanson

Psalm 1.

When you pick up a book of poetry or a book of song lyrics, you have to work. You cannot read Gerard Manley Hopkins or W.H. Auden or Bono the same way you read Malcolm Gladwell or Donald Miller. With poems, you have to stop often, read out loud at times, look in your heart […]

by Jon Swanson

A prayer for Monday

“Oh God.” That will be our prayer, God, many of us as we look at the clock for the first time on Monday morning, as we roll over and slap the alarm, as we feel the crush of realizing we have no idea where we left off in whatever projects are facing us. Hear our […]