E-Letter 161
I watched the pack of shirtless runners glide by the crumpled purple cloths wrapped around some scrub pines lining the freeway. All eyes of this sweaty fraternity of high school track athletes looked straight ahead, focused on the path of their practice run. No one so much as gave the purple cloths a glannce, nor, for that matter, the compact hedge of purple violets lining the street like a rundown strip mall. I angled my car into the church parking lot, jumped out, and crossed the busy street to retrieve the cloths. A blustery morning wind had swept the cloths from the display of three...
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E-Letter 160 March 20 I hear his song before I see him…a familiar avian friend and melodious junkyard bird, the church mockingbird. Last year he and his wife were “evicted” from their summer home in the Japanese maple tree outside my office window by a crazed cardinal who spent most of the year divebombing my window, glazing it with feather oil and shadows of blood. With spring just a promise away, this long-tailed, flighty, gray and white friend stakes out his territory early, filling the air with his beware ! pheromones and throaty warning, “This tree is my tree!” His mate safely esconced...
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The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. John 3:8 (NRSV) The Wind, Unboxed I study the curvature of my grandson’s 10 year-old shoulders and head hunched over his latest Rube Goldberg science project designed to hoodwink curious leprechauns. “Mom, do you know where I left that purple mechanical pencil?” he calls out with the confidence of a child who believes that mothers are a special breed born with third eyes in the backs of their heads and...
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The bike trail, covered with the detritus of the recent winter storms, clogs my grandson’s training wheels, bringing his four-year old energy to a screeching halt. “Wanna go look at that tree?” I ask him, hoping to divert his disappointment. “It looks like it got hit by lightning!” I boost him into the crook of the shattered tree, its raw v-shape newly created by the God of the Storm’s gift of an unexpected bolt of electricity piercing a night sky. “What’s this?” my grandson asks as he pokes a scaly patch of moss-green growth torn from the tree trunk split by the fury of a midnight storm....
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