nature on Loneliness

No person has ever walked our earth and been free from the pains of loneliness. Rich and poor, wise and ignorant, faith-filled and agnostic, healthy and unhealthy have all alike had to face and strugg...

I am abashed, solitary, helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pur...

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

Feel your sinfulness. Let it humble you. Let it sober you. Beware of so filling your life with talk shows and phone calls that you don’t regularly stop and consider the ruinous condition of your life ...

I once was significantly lost. When I was a college student in northern Wisconsin, my dad and I were hiking on a trail that was somewhat familiar to me. I had been on this trail just a few weeks befor...

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty...

In this excerpt of a poem by William Wordsworth, the poet describes our yearning for life beyond this life. Our desire for something greater than ourselves: Whether we be young or old, Our desti...

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

A large part of what it means to be human is to be one who longs after things. Sometimes, we have trouble putting into words the longings inside us. Take for example these words from Anne Frank, just ...

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how ...

Years ago, my family and I visited Sequoia National Park in California. The highlight of this trip was seeing the Giant Sequoia redwoods, after which the park is named. These trees are awe-inspiring, ...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

I actually want to believe that when it comes to communication, my biggest problem is outside of me, not inside of me. I want to think that it’s my kids, my wife, my neighbors, my boss. I want to thin...

From a purely biological point of view man is not at home anywhere in the world.

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

When we cannot find the words to pray, we are not faithless. We are feeling the fact that we are both embodied and vulnerable.

We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts”

Weeping is perhaps the most human and universal of all relief measures.

I am a human being, not a human doing.

Dangerous levels of exhaustion usually accumulate over a longer period of time in which we are consistently living beyond human limits, functioning outside our giftedness, or not paying attention to t...

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

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...

The thing to do with nature ... is to listen to it, and watch it, and look deep into its eyes in a sense, as though you were listening to and watching a friend, not just hearing the words or even just...

God is the Friend of Silence. See How Nature … Trees, Flowers, Grass... Grow in Silence.

New Testament Mountains Like the Old Testament, the New Testament has plenty of references to mountains.  There’s the Sermon on the Mount, obviously.  Jesus often went onto hills or mountains to pray...

Invitations are powerful. Like tides, they ebb and flow, shaping the contours of our existence. Some invitations we desperately want but never get—“Will you marry me?” or “Would you consider a promoti...

New Testament Mountains Like the Old Testament, the New Testament has plenty of references to mountains.  There’s the Sermon on the Mount, obviously.  Jesus often went onto hills or mountains to pray...

The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living a...

[Speaking of crucifixion] It seems almost inevitable to me that Jesus should go through this kind of darkness. . . . If you think of Jesus as God disguised as a man, then this will have no meaning for...