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Throughout this season of Lent, I have been taking time at the end of the day to pray. The goal was two-fold, to make space to listen to God, and to avoid absentmindedly scrolling through my phone at bedtime. It turns out that prayer is much better,…
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“Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.” –2 Corinthians 7:10 It was a most curious feeling. After I received my first vaccination shot, I did not want to shout it out as a m…
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Whenever it’s pizza night at our house, the biggest decision we usually have to make is whether to go with Canadian bacon & pineapple (the obvious, best pizza topping choice) or some other option. Sometimes we debate what size pizza we’ll…
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Dr. Seuss has been in the news this week. Not because Tuesday was the 117th birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel, the man behind the pen name of the beloved children’s book series. Rather, Seuss is in the news because Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company t…
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This evening is the beginning of the Jewish festival of Purim (POOR-um); well, it is if you are reading this on the day it appears in the St. Paul e-news (Feb. 25, 2021). Our Jewish neighbors will be undertaking a long-standing and meaningful observa…
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Recently a good friend of mine called to check-in. She happens to reside in a nursing home, and her recent months have been less than stellar. Actually, she never hesitates to tell me they have been awful. So I was glad to hear from her about a brigh…
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We’re now just over a month into the year 2021. And for a lot of us, the start of the new year had us hoping things would be much different—especially after all that 2020 brought us. We were convinced that turning the page of the calendar might just…
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The 90’s movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, is a brilliant romantic comedy, but my favorite part is not any of the jokes or the weddings, but the funeral. The friends gather to mourn the death of Gareth, a man of enthusiasm and unbridled joy. His par…
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The snow we received on Tuesday was the most powdery I’d seen in a long time. It was nothing like the dense, icy precipitation that has stuck around underneath. The contrast reminded me of an old claim that Eskimos have more than 50 different words f…
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Judging from the photographs taken on Inauguration Day, the Bible in Jill Biden’s hands for the swearing-in ceremony must have been at least 10 pounds. With a five-inch thick binding and metal clasps to hold the pages together, that was one big Bible…
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Among the more wondrous moments of 2020 was the appearance of the “Christmas star” in the early evening southwestern sky. People from many walks of life and across the planet took note of that infrequent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar…
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On one of the bookshelves in my office sits a small piece of driftwood. I picked it up along the shores of northern Lake Michigan while on vacation several years ago. It was a beautiful long weekend at a cabin with good friends where we enjoyed lots…