IN ORDINARY TIME BLOG
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A Tale of Two Sheep
I‘ve been thinking about sheep lately. Two in particular: let’s call them Trevor and Charlie. Trevor is the star of a car commercial. While his flock is contentedly grazing, he takes off in the opposite direction and jumps into an SUV driven by an affluent couple. He becomes their pet, of sorts, going for…
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Love My Neighbor?
By now, you may have heard of the woman whose neighbor plowed her driveway — unasked — which occasioned an op-ed about the perfidy of “Trumpites” as she calls them. While she grudgingly acknowledged that it seemed like a nice thing to do, she was having none of it. She went on to say…
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves
I got my first COVID vaccine shot the other day, ending weeks of wrestling with temptation. You see, until last week, the only way to even register for the vaccine — much less snag a coveted appointment — was to check the box that said I was 75 or older. Which I am not. …
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Forever 53
Today is my Mom’s birthday. She would have been 95 today. Of course, I have no way of knowing she would have been 95. I can’t say with any certainty that she would have lived to 55, much less 95. Still, I am assuming that, but for the lung cancer that took her at 53,…
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Naming Names
My father’s name was Howie. When my Mom called him for dinner, when my cousins greeted him, when my grandmother disparaged him behind his back, it was always “Howie.” Howie was the silent, sitting- on-a-powder-keg-of rage, odd man out in our house full of women. His name was Howie and because I knew his name,…
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Every Day is Saturday
The first Good Friday brought death and despair and shock to the band of followers of the prophet from Nazareth. On the day after — what we now call Holy Saturday — there was grief. And fear. And regret over what could have been done, what should have been done. And there was blame, plenty of…
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Two Tickets to Paradise
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen the finale of the TV show The Good Place, an adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and attended the funeral of one of my oldest and dearest friends. All in all, I’ve had the chance to think hard about the afterlife. The Good Place was a unicorn—a network TV…
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Tabula Rasa
It is 6 a.m. on January 1st. The sun is not up yet, and neither am I. Until I throw back the covers and my feet hit the floor, all good things are possible and all bad ones haven’t happened yet. The New Year is before me, clean and quiet as a new snowfall.…
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Knit, Purl, Me
Yesterday I took a piece of my life and wrapped it in cotton-candy-colored tissue paper. The attached note, tied on with matching ribbon, declared that in this gift — this prayer shawl — every stitch was a prayer. This is not exactly true. It is true that when I take up the needles, I…
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Christian Life, God with us, God’s provision, grief, hope, ministry presence, servanthood, Uncategorized, Writing
Are You Ready?
I stood in her kitchen, holding a pan of lasagna. She was a new mother and she had the disoriented look of someone who had just parachuted into enemy territory. I guess you could say that’s exactly what had happened to her, because this was not the homecoming she had planned. For one thing,…
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When Evil Walks In
“I don’t want you to alarm you …” Tell me, is it possible to hear those words and not be alarmed? The pastor of the church where I would be preaching that Sunday called to alert me about an “incident” during worship the previous week. A man showed up in the middle of worship and…
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Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
I just ended one of the longest relationships of my life. With the exception of the year I spent in France, I have read the New York Times every day since I was 12. There is nothing else I can think of — no other habit or ritual or compulsion — that I’ve practiced longer…