TAKING TIME
What a great relief it was to be away from the responsibilities, from the nearly constant demands on my time and attention. I was just sitting. Just being. Just quietly grateful for the loveliness of God’s creation, for the priceless gift of quiet, of time, of empty space.
As winter approaches, nights are longer and days are shorter, colder, and darker. In late October the leaves begin to fall. In the perennial border, leaves and stems begin to die back. The grass turns yellowish green before going brown and dead. Annual plants die completely. Winter is a stripped down time for trees and…
SHELTERED What do we do when everything seems to be so challenging? How do we keep going? Spring 2025 Newsletter in PDF format (3.6MB)
FEAR AND FATIGUE What a time we have all been having! What a challenging, difficult, demanding year! As if the pandemic were not enough, we’ve suffered through some of the worst fires in history in the West, and pummeling, unremitting hurricanes in the South and East. With all of this fatigue, and all of these…
DIFFERENCES Lately it seems that all we hear about is how divided we are in this country, and how different our opinions are on all sorts of things. With such deep differences and divisions, how are we able to hold together? Winter 2025 newsletter in PDF (1.7 MB)
IMAGE As humans, we are the pinnacle of God’s creation, made in God’s image and likeness—and yet formed out of the dust of the earth. Our all too earthy dust only came to life when God blew his breath, his Spirit into us. That being so, we are not only important, but in some unnamed…
SILENCE: Resistance and Refuge We are always aware of noise around us, sometimes even in a place like the Hermitage. But when we do silence those cell phones, turn off the gadgets, and unplug ourselves—at least temporarily—from the noise and commotion, what do we find? Fall 2019 Newsletter in PDF format (1MB)
