Whatever He Says

The credit for the title of this blog post goes to my son, Pete. (He also offered, "Things Worth Bringing Up," but we're saving that for a flu pandemic 😊.)  Here we are, in a boat with everyone else in the world, which we never planned to board. It's good that we're on it because it's a lifeboat, but we still have much to learn about life on board during a global pandemic! It's been a week of processing the unexpected, and adjusting to a new reality. We have genuine concerns and feel suddenly and utterly vulnerable. Little of this is in our control. But I woke up today thinking about what I can control. My friend, Janey, recently shared a quote in a story she wrote, and it gripped me so much that I scribbled it down on a scrap of paper: How you do anything is how you do everything. Richard Rohr It's a startling sentence to contemplate when I think of how I have been doing anything and everything this week. We have come to a sudde

I published this originally on May 20, 2019. I never imagined that less than a year later the world would be coming to a stop, which is why I'm republishing it: The dream stayed with me all day. It came in the moments before I woke up, right after a dream about forgetting pages with words to songs for our worship team (one of those dreams you get over and over when you have low-level anxiety about something.) The one I am writing about here was different, though, and the feeling of it lingered, In it, the world was utterly silent. Last weekend we woke up on Sunday morning to a planned hydro shut down for routine maintenance that I'd forgotten about. We had no hot water, no light, NO COFFEE! What I noticed immediately was the silence. We live with many sounds that we don't hear until they're not there. The silence in my dream though, was a complete worldwide silence--I knew that it signified the end of everything as it was the day before on earth. Everything had st

My friend, Joanne, rang the doorbell at precisely twelve noon. We are walking buddies but hadn't seen one another since January due to busy lives and inclement weather. After such a stretch we were excited to see one another again. We never lack great conversation, but now we had a backlog to catch up on! She even had a new haircut--instead of the longer style in this photo, her pure white hair sported an elegant tapered pixie bob. Joanne started talking right away as if she couldn't wait--"I just had a vivid dream about you," she said. In Joanne's dream, my house was full of friends who loved being there so much that they didn't want to go home. It was so crowded and busy that I built a third-floor turret where I could escape when I wanted to have some quiet reflective time! Meanwhile, downstairs, when I went to the kitchen to bake some pies, it was full of people bustling about, and fixing themselves snacks! Joanne couldn't know that one of my