Think of a single mother who goes to the Church or the Parish, and tells the secretary: I WANT TO BAPTIZE MY SON." And the attendant says: No, you can't, because you're not married.. Let's keep in mind that this mother had the courage to continue with a pregnancy, and...
We convince ourselves that life will be better after we get married, have a baby, then another. Then we are frustrated that the kids aren't old enough, and we'll be more content when they are. After that, we're frustrated that we have teenagers to deal with. We will...
God, the Artist Thou takest the pen– and the lines dance. Thou takest the flute– and the notes shimmer. Thou takest the brush– and the colours sing. So all things have meaning and beauty in that space beyond time where Thou art. How, then, can I hold back anything...
Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future. Faith is having the courage to dance to it today.
It is a big risk to love deeply, yet not to love is not to live.We need to love not just for the good stuff, but simply love for no good reason! So: Live freely. Sing your heart out. Cry until all your tears are spent. Laugh till you can't even catch your breath....
What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful...
An analogy: You are responsible for fifty teenagers. So you gather them together and put them in the parish hall and tell them to dance. You go for a cup of coffee. You return and witness this scene, a typical one: four or five girls dancing in the middle of the hall,...
You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And...
They were all sitting half dead in their wheelchairs, mostly paralyzed and just existing, they didn’t live. They watched some television, but if you had asked them what they had watched, they probably would not have been able to tell you. We brought in a young woman...
I believe we should consider church music basically to be THEOLOGICAL expression—part of the dialogue between God and worshipers. With few exceptions, music in worship is coupled with important words. For this reason, we should choose literature—for instance, hymns...