Singing Along the Journey
Thoughts about faith and wholeness set to the soundtrack of life

Fog. Literal fog. Well, maybe…

It is Monday morning and as I walk to breakfast with my eyes firmly fixed on the dark-sky-slipping-toward-light ahead of me, I am thinking about fog.  I am, after all, in the Bay area and there is plenty of it.  I'm actively resisting pulling out my phone to try and capture what I see all around me, because I know it cannot be done.  What I see defies at least my current level of photographic talent -- the subtle puffs of white, still clinging to the hill tops and valleys as the sun, painting its tell-tale deep pink stripes across the still grey-black sky in its attempt to chase those…
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Onward…

Having spent most of my years as a communicator of some kind, words are important to me.  If you combine that life experience with a good ten years spent in a worship community in which the song that lead into prayer during worship went like this, Our thoughts our prayers And we are always praying Our thoughts our prayers Take charge of what you are saying Seek a higher consciousness A state of peacefulness And know that God is always there. And every thought becomes a prayer. and you have, well me -- someone who over and over again examines the use of words that many people assume have a…
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At the turning of the year…

Here we are.  New Year's Eve (or soon to be, when the sun sinks from the sky), the year 2014 -- a year that I will gratefully kiss on the cheek as it passes into the past.  If 2013 was the year of the unimaginable and unwanted, then 2014 will bear the label of the year of recovery and transition.  Only time (and the value of hindsight on next New Year's eve) will reveal to us the defining characteristics of the year ahead. This December 31st, though, I find myself as I often am...organizing, cleaning, cooking, and preparing...but more than anything, missing the many years when I was part of…
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The days between…

Just before Christmas Day , I was lucky enough to enjoy the evening at President Washington's home, Mount Vernon, and to be there for the first (probably to become annual) Christmas Grand Illuminations.  It was a great deal of fun, overcrowded as most such events are in the Washington area, but the evening was just cold enough to feel of the season but not so cold as to be painful (particularly thanks to my newly acquired long underwear, purchased for our trip to Colorado).  The evening was festive, the fireworks spectacular. The most interesting portion of the program, however, was the welcome offered by George and Martha...well, not really George and…
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That toddlin’ town…

That is the song I always hear when I arrive in Chicago...the old one, not anything new and trendy.  But that seems fitting since my ties to this great city are long and deep and unrequited, ties that need to be revisited from time to time for reasons that are unclear to most who know me. What is it about Chicago?  Well, many years ago, years before I began to travel the world with frequency and ease, I packed a few belongings and a friend into a car and drove here to see the Tutankhamen exhibition at the vast Field Museum of Natural History.  I had never seen  a city…
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Five years later…

It has been five years.  Five years since I put on that worn out white robe and climbed those creaky, ancient stairs to the baptismal at the Calvary Baptist Church (only pausing long enough along the way to share with the pastor that I was deathly afraid of water).  Five years ago, for the second time in my life, I was baptized.  This time it wasn't a sprinkle of water, it was baptism by full immersion.  And it was well worth facing my desperate fear of water. I am, quite naturally, a person who remembers anniversaries, and so each year on this date I have stopped to consider my baptism.…
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Wait, is it already Advent?

Yes, I admit it.  I am behind.  Travelling will do that to me.  The end of the semester will do that to me.  Preparing for a concert where I am singing something totally new (like I am next week) pushes all sense of time and season out of the way.  Today, however, I decided to face the truth -- Advent has begun without me. And so, while I am busy getting my act together, I convinced myself that one good Advent devotional activity would be to go back and read some of the things that I myself wrote in years past during this season.  I hope you will not mind…
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Thanksgivings for one and all…

This is the day when many of us pause to remember the blessings in our lives.  It is a day when some find that remembrance impossible, because of fear or grief or illness.  It is therefore incumbent upon those of us who feel bathed in blessing most days of our lives to stop and remember for them, to remember for those who cannot see God's love around them through the tears. For all my friends, and for all of those in the world who need it this day, I share this prayer from Shane Claiborne's Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals: Lord, just as your love knows no bounds…
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The Storm is Passing Over, Pt. 3: The Letting Go in the Moving On

I am sitting here in a warm, comfortable condo in Telluride, Colorado, watching the snow fall for the second day in a row.  Out my window, I can see birch trees and clean white powder, chair lifts drifting upwards to freshly groomed mountain ski trails, and the sun as it begins to peak through the snow flakes in this destination resort that claims 300 + days of sunshine each year.  In this week when the people of our nation turn their hearts and minds to the idea of thanksgiving, I am sitting here feeling the deepest of thanks as I embrace the beauty of nature all around me, a brief moment of…
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Breaking the silence with another’s words…

Yesterday, as I worked cleaning out the garden and preparing it for the winter ahead, I had to pull out a plant that I had nurtured for at least six years.  Years ago, at a local garden center, there were bargain plants in these tiny blue boxes for $0.99.  At the time, I really didn't understand much about gardening and so I thought that I would buy four or five different ones and that would be enough.  I did not know anything about arranging plants or about how far they might spread when they grew, etc. and so forth.  And from that tiny, tiny blue box, eventually, a six foot…
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