Browsing Category: Journal Pages

               We lost another game.  I’d like to say we looked better, have turned a corner—but we haven’t, not yet.                 Sometimes, when we’re working to be better, we look worse before improvement and the effort show.  That’s part of the learning, part of the growth—doing before we’re fully prepared but must do, still, because […]

               “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the LORD intends?  For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans.  For the corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns.  And scarce do we guess the things on earth, and […]

        Twice this week I prayed for rain.         Twice this week—it fell, not a lot, not heavy and flooding, but enough to sign my prayers were heard.         All spring and early summer, all it did was rain.  Finally, it stopped, and when it did, I did not pray […]

August 28, 2025:                Today is the Feast of Saint Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the church, whose Confessions and City of God remain two of the Church’s most definitive works in explaining personal experience with the Holy Spirit and the Church to lost and fallen world in collapse of the Roman Empire.                Yesterday […]

               “And Jesus passing by, saw a man, who was blind from his birth: And his disciples asked him: Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?  Jesus answered: Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in […]

        Sky is overcast.  I cannot see the sun, and there is a heavy of humidity absent for many days—portend of a storm to come.           The cicadas swell and wane in crescendo song.  I sit beneath a sycamore—broad leaves and balls still in summer green.         I watch my son […]

               August’s feel has made me melancholy. I know I should be grateful in reprieve and arrival of a cool, to take comfort in the change; but in it, I feel summer’s end.  Summer’s death into usher of fall when we are perhaps most open, showing—and knowing—of our truest selves.  But then comes winter, cold […]

               There is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, “Fathers and Sons,” that is one of my most-favorites ever read.  Growing up, there was a book of his short stories—The Finca Vigia Edition—that I would check out again and again from our local library to read and reread the stories shared within.                I have […]

               On Sundays when it’s just he and I at Mass, my youngest son, he never stops speaking.                We arrive just as mass begins, and I let him pick our seats.  He leads to the left—side where we usually sit because, in morning light, the pews are cast in colors from stained glass stories […]

               Last night, our smalltown held a “Meet the Cards” Night in our high school gym where every fall middle school, high school team—and player—were announced and introduced to all who came to see.                 It is our oldest two’s first year as high schoolers.                 We arrive late and sit near the rafters—great view […]