Browsing Category: Journal Pages

        “I am living an answered prayer,” I remind myself—sitting on a bucket, shagging balls as my son throws from a homemade mound into a homemade strike zone and backstop.  He’s just home from practice and still wants to play.         “Dad, do you want to watch me pitch?” he asked when […]

               “Many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what Jesus had done began to believe in him.  But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.  So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, ‘What are we going to do?  This […]

               I wrote a story yesterday, one I thought might resonate and lead someone to respond.  No one did.  Reflecting, I thought how some stories we love mean nothing to others and how others—ones we scribble in a moment, discard and dismiss—are loved for reasons we ourselves don’t see.                As a writer, it made […]

               Owen and I worked more on the basketball hoop yesterday.  I started in when I got home from the farm, and it was a slow-go, even with directions.  Directions called for plastic washers between each pivot and point of friction where bolts threaded to the frame.  I searched every box I’d opened, and I […]

               It’s eighteen degrees right now.  Tomorrow, it’ll be eighty.  Missouri weather is a little like life: it doesn’t have to make sense, it is what it is, and you make the most with how it comes.                Yesterday, I tried to do taxes.  I had little success.  My greatest efforts were in cleaning off […]

               “Naaman, the army commander of the king of Aram, was highly esteemed and respected by his master, for through him the LORD had brought victory to Aram.  But valiant as he was, the man was a leper.  Now the Arameans had captured in a raid on the land of Israel a little girl, who […]

               “Brothers and sisters: since we have been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in hope of the glory of God.                 And hope does not disappoint, because the love […]

               “The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”—Matthew 20:28 _____                Last line of today’s Gospel, in reflection, I ask:                How do we serve?  Whom do we serve?  What ways do we share, give outward of ourselves in […]