New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.
04172 – Beginnings & Endings
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02612 – The Middle: Crucial Part of the Story
When we tell stories that start with a sudden beginning and jump to an ending that only God could write, we skip over a crucial part of the story: the middle. The place where we wait. Where we sit in silence. Where we have no answers. Where our hearts ache and we...
02237 – Doubt is the Beginning of Real Faith
The problem with accepting truth as it comes to us rather than truth as we divine it for ourselves is that it's not worth dying for--and we don't. It becomes a patina of ideas inside of which we live our lives without passion, without care. This kind of faith happens...
02019 – Have Faith!
Our challenge is to have faith--in failure, in success, in whatever life brings. The unexpected turns, the painful endings, the precarious beginnings are all part of the path of faith, where we are reminded with each step that the Resurrection did not happen only once...
01758 – The Beginning of Love
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
01675 – God Should Have the First & Last Words
We are silent at the beginning of the day because God should have the first word, and we are silent before going to sleep because the last word also belongs to God.
01521 – “What May This Be?”
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus,...
01255 – Letting Go Involves Many Steps
Shifting from a self-centered focus to a more God-centered focus is terribly hard. I think we've gone wrong by assuming that such a radical movement can be achieved simply by setting our jaw and saying one or two prayers of relinquishment. Letting go isn't one step,...
01175 – Indifference: Worse than Despair
Why are people indifferent? Don't people understand that indifference is probably the worst plague that exists in life? It is worse than despair. Despair is a beginning. Despair can inspire you to create great works of art, music, literature, philosophy, theology....
00861 – We Can Participate in Building a Great Musical Culture
One man does not make a wave. We are all carried by the flood of heroism in the human spirit. A symphony orchestra is no different. If we are fortunate in our times, we achieve a few moments of that heroism. But this is only the beginning, only the drawings on the...