The preparations for Thanksgiving dinner have begun in the Longard house. The turkey is in the roaster (an 11 lb turkey seems like a piece of cake after cooking 2 20lb turkeys on Sunday for our friends at Penn Place). Various family members are working on starting their parts of the meal (Our middle daughter …
Continue reading Thankful For Those Who Are Eating Elsewhere Today
This is a picture my friend, Angela Hopson, took will doing outreach among friends experiencing homelessness this week. It shows an area at one encampment where boxes of perishable and non-perishable food is just dumped for people in the camp to use. For those of us who work regularly with friends experiencing homelessness, we need …
Continue reading Why “Random Acts of Kindness” Aren’t Always Kind
I'm sitting here this morning thinking over the passage we will be reading at the Diakonos Community Simple Church Gathering tomorrow morning. Our theme for the day is "We Die With Christ." I'm particularly struck by these two illustrations presented by Jesus: "Don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of …
We have refused to find common ground around our goals which are the same. This divisiveness only benefits the real enemy, Satan, who can keep people trapped in a life of hopelessness while those who seek to help them fight each other.
By faith he (Abraham) went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.... These all died in faith, not having …
One of my favorite writers lives under my own roof. I really liked a couple of pieces Tina has written lately and asked her permission to include them on this blog as a way to share them with others. The first is a reflection she wrote early in the Advent Season, after one of our …
Continue reading Guest Post by Tina Longard: Christmas: The Heart of the Battle of the Ages
This is the continuation of a collection of posts I'm doing this year about some of my favorite "Christmas Songs" that most people may not think of when they think of Christmas. They're not in any particular order and I'm not sure how many I'll come up with, so I wouldn't exactly call it a …
Continue reading Atypical (and modern) Christmas Songs: Better Days
My blog has been silent for the last three months. With the beginning of a new school year, fall usually brings about the slowing down of writing activity. This fall has been particularly active in a number of ways: adjusting to a regular part-time teaching routine at my daughters' school, new relationships in and around …
This past weekend I had the "opportunity" to experience just a piece of the helplessness many of the most vulnerable people in our city experience on a daily basis. This was not a staged learning experience where you know no matter what's going on it's only pretend, but instead a situation where you are in …
Recently a friend posted a quote on Facebook from Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero. I found the quote so good I decided to check the book out at our local library and read more. Having been on a journey towards a more emotionally healthy faith over the past nine years (I'm sure I still have …
