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What is freedom, really? I have been mulling this after getting a haircut this week. As I listened to the story of the woman who cut my hair, what I got was a feeling of ultimate impermanence. She had been raised between two places, shuttling back and forth whenever her current parent lost their luster.
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Is there a more poignant verse in the Bible than John 1:11? Especially in the Revised Standard Version. “He came to his own home, and his own people knew him not.” You know that image of returning home unremembered and unrecognized is poignant, because it shows up in movies so often. It’s a Wonderful Life,
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I’m not a big fan of the Gospel of John. You’d think I would be, since nobody talks about love more than he does. But he’s also the most divisive of the gospel writers, and the most prone to poetry over storytelling. Plus he writes really, really long, profound thoughts, even though he uses small
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The journal I’m using has a title page from January 2020, and I chuckle every time I pick it up, because it reminds me of the naïveté of best laid plans. Entering Lent, I wanted to focus on three things. I added a fourth, or rather, a fourth added itself by being so self-evidently necessary.
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Good Friday God We want the God of Easter, an all-powerful God who conquers death. We want the God of Emmaus, an all-knowing and wise God who can explain how in the grand plan this wreckage makes righteous sense. But sometimes what we get is the God of Good Friday, an all-loving God who hurts
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Fear shrinks our world.Love expands it. But not exactly in a mirroring way. Fear makes us shrink our world by closing off options. We can’t go there/say that/do this/meet them because of a dread of “What if?” When we can’t face down the “What if’s”, they multiply, closing doors of opportunity until we lock ourselves
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Castle, caravan, or cookout? Some people see the Church, and the Country, as a castle. A fortress with fortifications constructed to protect the good from the evil. The good people from the evil people. The good values, society, norms, history from the decadent. The Truth from Lies. The Pure from spoil. Usually, it seems, the
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His name was Roger. I worked in residence life for three years of undergrad and four years of graduate school, and I will tell you that what I learned helping run dorms has been more useful than anything I learned in classes those seven years. (Except my Radio-TV Speech class; I actually use the skills
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I spent more than 17 hours on the phone over a three-week span between Thanksgiving and Christmas with a company’s representatives. (So, how were your holidays?) The first call was 3 ½ hours on hold followed by a 30-minute conversation to make the purchase I intended. Due to a series of errors made by the
Reading Francis 