Work

Thanksgiving Day will be here soon, one week from today. We think of Thanksgiving as an event. We celebrate it with large meals, parades, lots of football on television. For some of us Thanksgiving is the beginning of the retail season. There are people who have jobs which require them to work on Thanksgiving Day. […]

It can be a challenge for us to forgive each other, and a challenge to know when we are forgiven. Forgiveness almost always seems to come as a surprise. It is usually the product of long, hard work. Many of us do not have a clear idea of what forgiveness is, how it works. We are

November is the month we get a gratitude booster shot. Several people I know keep public gratefulness journals in November each year. Each day we read their expressions of thanks for aspects of their lives. It can be helpful to be reminded every so often. We may forget we need to share our appreciation. There is power in giving thanks. Gratefulness transforms

People tell me I ask good questions. It is not really a surprise. I have been asking questions for as long as I can remember. As a child I asked questions because I believed the people around me knew the answers. Life for me was built on finding answers. The only way I knew to find

It is ironic that “discerning” is one of those words we think we understand but cannot explain. We may say that someone has a discerning eye, or is a person of discernment. We mean we appreciate their taste or opinion, we agree with them. We rely on our own ability to discern to understand how discerning

We blanket our lives with routines and habits, wrapping them in expectations and assumptions. They protect us from what we fear, what intimidates us, what causes our anxieties. When we are afraid we will fail, afraid we might succeed, we anesthetize ourselves. When we are afraid we will always be alone, or we may never have a moment’s peace,

It can be easy for us to take work for granted. We see work as a necessary evil. We go to work so we can make money and buy things. Work is a step on the path toward what we want. If we can change jobs and get more money for doing the same work, or less, we can

People remember. We remember people who have made meaningful contributions to our lives. Some of those contributions have taught us deep truths. Some have given us great joy or satisfaction; some have caused us intense pain or suffering. We believe we remember specific days or moments. We think we remember where we were when important events

The greatest, longest, most challenging struggle of our lives is becoming who we are. Every thought, every experience holds clues which help us discover our deeper selves. Every memory, every fear, every moment of joy is a key which opens another door. It is as if we have hidden who we are before we were aware. We

We live in a world fixated on the importance of answers. The point of living in the Information Age appears to be the accessibility of answers. We expect to be able to find answers with a few clicks or keystrokes. Our great institutions of education, commerce, even religion focus their efforts on finding answers. We tend to