Dealing with Difficult Relatives
Your friends, family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing. -Jim Rohn OK, so I admit it. I’m not normally a reader of Max Lucado’s work. But I have had many chats lately with a lot of people feeling pain about the “hellidays,” family time, obligations and expectations, stresses and so on. Not a lot of excitement about connecting with the famdamly in these conversations. So, I thought I’d pass along something someone sent me about how...
Read MoreGetting There
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. ~~Ralph Waldo Emerson Hello all 🙂 I was talking with some folks over the weekend about the paths we walk…how we think the path we are on will lead to a certain place, but part of the journey is accepting when it wanders into other areas. Staying on the path and getting there aren’t necessarily the same thing, but probably all part of the same path. It reminded me of the wonderful poem by David Wagoner, so I thought I’d post it. We’ve all earned this ” worn-down, hard,...
Read MoreLove is Kind
Love is patient, love is kind… It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres… Love never fails… And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. ~~1 Corinthians 13 I thought a lot about those verses from 1 Corinthians the last week or so. They are often used at weddings as the example of pure love, of how we are to interact with another, but the full verse is the example of God’s Love for us. But I think they are also an aspiration for many of us, one that I don’t live out as well as I’d like, if I...
Read MoreRest for your souls…
Stand at the crossroads and look; ask about the ancient paths, “Which one is the good way?” Take it, and you will find rest for your souls… ~~Jeremiah 6:16 I snapped this picture when we had just hiked over Skull Bridge, at the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) near Abiquiu, New Mexico. The Trail head is just over that bridge and heads south into the Rio Chamas Wilderness area, a gorgeous place no matter what time of year. I wrote about this trip recently in a post titled Smile at Fear; if you are interested, you can read that entry from the Blessings Blog here....
Read MoreThe Bridge, a Story about Consequences
“To confront a person with their own shadow is to show them their own light…” ~~Carl Jung This is a story about fear, about our choices and ultimately what we are responsible for in our lives…To what do we owe ourselves and the Other, whomever that may be? How do we face our fears? If you like this story and the following questions, I wrote a post on the Blessings Blog called Smiling at Fear, about how we face these choices and deal with these inevitable situations in our lives. If you are interested, you can find that here. I got this story some time ago from...
Read MoreSpiritual Fruits or Just Nuts?
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Let the beauty we love be what we do. ~~Rumi I love this picture, taken when the Christ the Redeemer statue was under construction. One of the New Seven Wonders of the World, it was built in Rio di Janiero in the 1920’s and is huge, overlooking the whole city. It captures how I so often feel on the path and I look at it from time to time to remind me of what it symbolizes to me in my...
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