Contagious Generosity
During a recent presentation on my 10-part wellness model, I was asked to give some examples to help illustrate what “financial wellness” looks like when put into practice. If it isn’t how much money you have (which I had explained it isn’t), what exactly is it? I gave two personal experiences I had fairly recently, […]
Healing Relationships Across the Divide
I haven’t felt this much division in our country in my lifetime! This growing political chasm has been my most pressing concern for some time. If you follow my blog, you’ll know I wrote about it in 2020 , but since then it seems we have made no strides toward mending the divide and it continues […]
The Struggle and Freedom of Forgiving
As my editor and I were discussing possible topics for the upcoming post, I mentioned that one of the things most on my mind was the recent death of a close childhood friend. Grieving his death had been particularly difficult since we’d had some “unfinished business” that I’d no longer be able to work out […]
Friends Are Everywhere
I was in the children’s wing of the local library, scoping the shelves for books to read to our grandsons back in Pennsylvania during our weekly FaceTime sessions, a ritual we practice faithfully while we are overwintering in Florida, when a young boy darted by. “I will be in the back room with my friend!” […]
Encountering a Most Unlikely Teacher
When you think of someone who can be your teacher, what comes to mind? Someone older? Wiser? More accomplished? Someone with special expertise or who seems to have their life “together”? Is it possible you may have missed some “unlikely” teachers (and what they had to offer) because they didn’t come wrapped in packaging you […]
The Church is Not a Building!
This is the church This is the steeple Open the doors and see all the people! Do you recognize those words? Perhaps, like me, you learned this song as a child, along with the hand motions that went with it. First, your index fingers form the “steeple” in front of your interlaced fingers (the “church”); […]
Heavy Stuff
What are we going to do with all of this stuff?!? As you may know by reading my past posts, based on our advancing age and increasing physical limitations, Rita and I are planning to move into some kind of life care community at some point in the future. In looking at several communities and […]
Learning from Barry
The question came completely out of the blue. I was talking with a friend who has very strong opinions politically, often quite different from my own. He generally tolerates (appreciates might be going a bit too far!) my questions which are usually focused on helping me better understand his positions and how he came to […]
The Best Investment Advice I Ever Got
When I was a youngster just starting my own newspaper route, I got some advice from a friend of the family. “You need to open your own savings account and get into the habit of saving,” he told me. “If you pay yourself first and make those deposits on a regular basis, between your savings […]