Posts – Page 7 – Deepening Our Journey

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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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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