Bearing the Load

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. The Windsor Guildhall, which serves as the town hall for the community of Windsor in the county of Berkshire, England, has two claims to fame.  In recent years it’s become a fashionable place for celebrity weddings.  On April 9, 2005, Prince Charles and his longtime mistress Camilla Parker Bowles (now the king and queen… Read more »

Holy Ground

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Some years ago, a woman named Patricia Miller, who worked in a hospital emergency room, recounted an experience that changed her life. Things at first didn’t seem to be heading in that direction. She admits that she had “learned to stop crying at the pain around me.  Each day it seemed I was becoming… Read more »

Moving Into the Neighborhood

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Long-time residents of Chicago can still remember when their mayor moved into hell. Actually, Jane Byrne and her husband moved into the area on the Near North Side that had long been known as Little Hell.  That name went back to the 1850s, when Irish immigrants lived in dismal conditions near a gas refinery… Read more »

Send Me Home

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Over the course of a ministry that spanned more than four decades, Tim Keller taught people how to live. After he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2020, Keller began to focus on teaching people how to die – a mission that he completed last Friday morning when he left this world… Read more »

Blowin’ in the Wind

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. It’s Dandelion Explosion Season.  About the time that daily temperatures hover in the mid-70s, countless trillions of dandelions suddenly begin to bloom. They thrive on all seven continents – even Antarctica.  Historically, this member of the daisy family is prized as great medicine and great food. It turns out that dandelions are storehouses of pharmacologically… Read more »

Graffiti

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Hollywood’s love affair with Indiana Jones launched an international passion for archeology.  Who wouldn’t want to crack open the door of a long-forgotten temple – unseen by human eyes for centuries – in order to search for priceless treasures?  OK, maybe crack open the door of a long-forgotten temple without all the cobwebs… Read more »

Flowing Streams

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Residents of the American Southwest are hoping against hope they won’t have to face two “dead pools” this year. That sentiment has nothing to do with Deadpool, the wisecracking Marvel comic book character played by Ryan Reynolds.  “Dead pool” is the worst-case scenario for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs… Read more »

Flowing Streams

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Residents of the American Southwest are hoping against hope they won’t have to face two “dead pools” this year. That sentiment has nothing to do with Deadpool, the wisecracking Marvel comic book character played by Ryan Reynolds.  “Dead pool” is the worst-case scenario for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs… Read more »

Now, That’s Creepy

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. What profession creeps people out more than any other? We don’t need a scientific study to confirm what we already suspect: People are seriously creeped out by clowns. According to the digital news source Vox, more Americans are afraid of clowns than of climate change, terrorism, and even death.  A few years ago, Dr. Frank McAndrew,… Read more »

Faces

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Windsor Elliot was blessed with one of the world’s most beautiful faces. During her meteoric rise as a fashion supermodel in the 1960s, she appeared on the cover of Vogue four times, including the one displayed above.  Diana Vreeland, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, coached her models with a simple six-word maxim: Fake it, fake it,… Read more »