words on Longings

Mark Rutland humorously recalls a survey asking Americans which words they most long to hear. As expected, the top response was, “ I love you. ” The second was, “ I forgive you .” ...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

‘For my own way of expressing myself almost always disappoints me… I am saddened that my tongue cannot live up to my heart.’

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

In the silence, we raise our voice before you. We wonder aloud why you are so far from us when we call. In the agony of our cry, we are reminded that it is we who have wandered from your fold, from th...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

God, be all our love, all our hope, all our striving; let our thoughts and words flow from you, our daily life be in you, and every breath we take be for you. Amen.

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in 'religion' mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.... When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making ...

Pastor: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and i...

As a language-user, I’m bound to all the audacious capacities and frustrating limits of words. We label, we name, we frame all of our experiences, past, present, and future. We give words to our inner...

Have you heard God's blessing in your inmost being? Are the words, 'You are my beloved child, in whom I delight' an endless source of joy and strength? Have you sensed, through the Holy Sp...

Leader: Heavenly Father, I confess that I have sinned against you. I have delighted my soul in other things more than I have in you. Why, then, is it any surprise to me that you feel far off from me? ...

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

It remains wonderful that mere puffs of wind should allow men to discover what they think and feel, to share their attitudes and plans, to anticipate the future and learn from the past, and to create ...

I like hanging around words, listening to what they say.

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all...

Father God, we confess that the actions of our hands do not often match the words of our mouths. We say one thing and do another. We give you praise and curse a friend, we sing songs of thanksgiving a...

Voice 1: Words! Voice 2: By them the universe was created: planets and moons, stars and sky, all living things, day and night. People: We come today to worship and adore the Creator of this world and...

Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves ...

Be sincere, Be brief, Be seated.

I am not a mountain climber, but a few years ago I had the idea that I might want to climb seriously, so I started to read and to train. I’ve climbed a few glacier-covered mountains in the northwester...

Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, do...

Many churches today remind me of a laboring crew trying to gather in a harvest while they sit in the tool shed. They go to the tool shed every Sunday and they study bigger and better methods of agricu...

My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...

The next time you say something deceitful, hurtful or proud, you cannot say “I don’t know what came over me.” Nothing came over you. Such sins come _out_of you. They come from a wellspring that is ver...

Imagine, if you will, that you work for a company whose president found it necessary to travel out of the country and spend an extended period of time abroad. So he says to you and the other trusted e...

Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

A young woman confessed to an older man that she had a problem saying too much about people. He told her to go buy a bird and pluck out its feathers one by one as penance for her sin. When she returne...

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.