300 words a day

God. We aren’t sure who to trust and who to fear. We aren’t sure we can trust those who speak for you. We shrink our sense of who you are to the descriptions we hear, to the outcomes we want. We confess that we don’t know you very well. We confess that we say, with […]

I wrote this last year as I was talking to God on behalf of my coworkers. +++ God. “Out of the depths we cry to you, O Lord.” That’s what an ancient pray-er said to you. And I’m guessing that those words are heard in our rooms every day.For the patient with a hard diagnosis.For […]

It sounds like a New York City school, the kind that showed up in old-time kids books. P.S 119. It reads like an exercise from an old-time school. “Write an 16-line poem for every letter of the alphabet. And make each poem be two-line couplets, compare and contrast, repetition, expansion. And make them all be […]

I’ve never talked with you about Psalm 121. It’s a song that strengthens me. When my heart sings it, I am encouraged. It has been shaping me for a several decades but I’ve never talked with you about it. “The sun will not smite me by day, nor the moon by night.” That’s not exactly how the […]

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 […]