2020

I have fond memories of playing in the forest behind my childhood home. It was, in a way, another home for me and my imagination. Spacious and safe, it was a place of creative communion. There’s a big tree across the river where I currently live. My friend Anne calls the tree, “Grandfather.” He is a faithful presence as each day dawns. “And let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love him, we wake up inside Christ’s body.” —St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)

2018

Emily Joy writes in today’s Keep Watch with Me Lenten Reader, “That none of us is a fixed point. That we are capable of intaking new information, expanding the horizons of our compassion, and adjusting our behavior accordingly. That resurrection reliably takes place when you’re open to it, when you’re willing to end your love affair with certainty.”

2017

“Touch is the miracle.” ~Walt Whitman

2016

“Loving our neighbor means knowing them, listening to them, accompanying them, striving together for the benefit of them, sharing ourselves with them and being open to noticing God in them. … Jesus calls us to truly engage in loving relationships with those experiencing hunger, poverty, loneliness, inequity, oppression and injustice.” ~Sister Liz Colver, Northwest Washington Synod of the ELCA

2014

Galatians 6:14… May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. “We follow a border-crossing Jesus, who calls us to be a border-crossing church,” writes Bishop Mike Rinehart. This journal page attempts to illustrate the power of the cross that dissolves all borders and expands us.