Posts – Page 7 – Deepening Our Journey

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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Learning from Barry

September 1, 2021

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 them. One day he turned the tables and asked me, “By the way, how did you originally get interested in trying to seek out and understand folks who are different or think differently than you

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The Best Investment Advice I Ever Got

August 1, 2021

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 and the interest you’ll be totally surprised at how quickly it grows!” Then, in what seemed like a throw-away statement, he added, “Actually most aspects of life are like that, especially relationships, whether it’s a

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No Dying for Me!

July 5, 2021

“Wow! I thought we had a lot of cicadas at our house!” said the FedEx deliverywoman as she viewed the “too many to count” carcasses spread over our macadam driveway. “During the summer,” she went on, “I like to sleep with our bedroom windows open but I can’t stand to do that now because of the horrible noise they make.” Her comments reminded me how much my own response to this rather large bug had changed in just a short span of time. Just days before I had encountered a

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My Two “Go-to” Questions

June 7, 2021

How it is that the close 20-year friendship of two next-door neighbors ended over dandelions? That is the question I pondered when I heard about the rift that had developed between two couples who live in a rural development near me. The development is quite attractive; the lots are between one and two acres and all of the homes are uniquely designed, expensive, and well cared for. A small stream runs through the rear of the properties and the lawns are meticulously manicured, by either small outside lawn care companies

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Choosing Transformation

May 10, 2021

For Easter this year, in addition to the obligatory basket of candy, we gave our two grandsons a butterfly farm. It’s an all-inclusive package with five very tiny caterpillars that grow so fast that I swear you can actually see them get bigger if you can sit still for a period of time! Rita and I got to see the transformation ourselves at various points in the process and between visits, the boys kept us updated by texting us pictures. Watching the process of transformation was quite amazing. At about

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Caring Confrontation

April 1, 2021

One of my favorite things about writing this blog is the dialogue it creates with readers. In the feedback on my latest post on humor, several loyal readers specifically commented on one particular passage, a challenge I “snuck” into the text that they wanted me to say more about. The section in question reads: “[H]umor should never be at a cost to another person. Actually everything done or said that could possibly create pain or alienation is the opposite of humor and I believe we have an obligation to confront

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