ruth on Loneliness

I was listening to a lecture on friendship to prepare this sermon and the speaker used the movie The Bride of Frankenstein as an illustration. Now, for this to work, you have to put the movie Young...

Our current cultural moment makes rich, life-giving friendships like the one David and Jonathan shared a challenge. We are connected like never before, yet isolated and lonely like never before. MIT p...

The etymology of certain words can profoundly enrich our understanding and experience of life. Consider the word “consolation.” Its roots lie in the Latin words “con-” meaning “ “to be ” and “solus,...

Father—you know us like no-one else; and ...You love us like no-one else. Thank You for your manifold gifts. For the gift of life—we thank You. For the gift of each new day—we thank You. For the gift ...

It’s been said home is the place where they have to let you in. While it’s a reach to say I’m friends with each of my family members, our relationships thrive because we share a mutual, understood res...

My friend Wendy calls the incremental disappointments we endure over the years “the slow leak of life.”

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain an...

Love alone makes heavy burdens light and bears in equal balance things pleasing and displeasing. Love bears a heavy burden and does not feel it, and love makes bitter things tasteful and sweet.

“God pity them both! and pity us all,  Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;  For of all sad words of tongue or pen,  The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’  Ah, well! for us all some...

If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

The True Self is all about right relationship, not requirements. It’s not about being correct; it’s about being connected, which you always were—you just didn’t realize it.

Emma Darwin, a devoted wife to Charles, did not share his passion for science, nor did she pretend to be captivated by the many lectures and events she attended by his side. On one occasion, as they s...

Adapted from Ch 4 of On Getting out of Bed. Why is Existence Good? Living for the sake of living—doing things so that you can continue to efficiently do things—begs the question, Why live? To live...

An Irish church once had a humorous yet insightful motto that gets at the heart of the pain that often accompanies our relationships: “To dwell above with those we love will certainly be glory. But to...

Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.

Sometimes to follow in the footsteps of Jesus is to walk away from others or to let them walk away from us.

My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.

Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave us a new circle of fri...

A student who had recently lost his sight was sent to the Seeing Eye Institute for the Blind in Morristown, New Jersey, for specialized training. Upon arrival, he was greeted by another young ma...

What is our responsibility to our neighbor? This is a question many have asked, including the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Meditating on the topic he observed, “To patiently endure wrongs done ...

The story is told (as in, it’s made up!) of a small dog that had been struck by a car and lay wounded by the side of the road. A doctor driving by noticed the dog was still alive, stopped his car, pic...

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

In an interview discussing her most recent book Hamnet, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell shares a great analogy on grief. It started with research she needed to do on embroidery, an area in which she was...

Friends are individuals who are relational assets and not liabilities. Friends are those whom God escorts into our environments because there is something they need to be for us in order to help us be...

What’s the bravest thing you ever did? . . . Getting up this morning.

An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.

Though Jim was just a little older than Phillip and often assumed the role of leader, they did everything together. They even went to high school and college together. After college they decided to jo...

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?