Posts – Page 6 – Deepening Our Journey

Yet Another Lesson in Slowing Down

May 30, 2022

I spend a lot of time observing the amazing variety of flora and fauna from my back patio. I feel close to God while experiencing nature, and I often see something in the way an animal or even a plant will behave that I can apply to my own life. Recently I had occasion to take a lesson from my own responses to some of my backyard neighbors. For several years a pair of my feathered friends had been building a nest on top of our ceiling light on the

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A Visit to Hospice University

April 28, 2022

Rita and I had just arrived at our “new digs” in an over 55 community (we obviously had to fudge our ages) in central Florida. The condo we rented was beautiful, well-furnished, and overlooked a lake. The owners live there periodically so it had just about everything we needed. One thing it didn’t have was a coffee brewer. Since I try to avoid single-use plastics as much as possible, I decided to look for a used coffee maker so we didn’t need to use Keurig in the condo. Besides, it

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Contagious Generosity

March 30, 2022

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, one involving a pastor I know from Pennsylvania and his wife, and the other a single gentleman of limited means. They each demonstrated an ease, security, and “financial freedom” that we can all strive for,

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Healing Relationships Across the Divide

March 1, 2022

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 to poison relationships at all levels of society. Even close friends and family members are finding it difficult to keep politics from disrupting—and sometimes even destroying—their relationships. Just recently I called to check on Norm,

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The Struggle and Freedom of Forgiving

February 4, 2022

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 with him. My editor suggested I consider writing a post about forgiveness—it is certainly a relevant subject and it might even help me process my feelings. It seemed like a good suggestion, but as I

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Friends Are Everywhere

January 2, 2022

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!” he announced to the nearby young woman I assumed to be his mother. “But we didn’t bring any of your friends along this time,” she said. “I know,” he replied, “but this friend let me

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Encountering a Most Unlikely Teacher

November 30, 2021

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 recognized? Recently Rita and I were driving through a small town in Vermont and spotted a very short, thin, stooped senior woman shuffling very slowly beside the road using an old collapsible baby stroller for

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The Church is Not a Building!

October 31, 2021

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”); then you flip your hands over and wiggle your still-interlocked fingers to see all the “people.” I looked it up on YouTube and it actually came up, just as I remembered it. The hand motions

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Heavy Stuff

October 4, 2021

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 their various housing options, from cottages to hybrid condos, it became very clear most of the stuff from our four-bedroom house, oversized double garage, two large attics, and large outside shed will have to go!

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