She'd grown up in very traditional Baptist churches, long before most any Baptist church thought about observing the season of Lent. So it was only natural when she saw someone with a smudge of something on their forehead that she took tissue in hand to try to get it off for them.

It wasn't just a dirty spot, of course. They were ashes carefully smudged by some minister somewhere, a reminder front and center of what we usually try to push to the back.

From ashes we come and to ashes we return.

It’s a strange sort of thing if you think about it. People walking around in the midst of the workdays and school days and all the rest with signs of death right there on their foreheads for God and the world to see. 

Once upon a time not so very long ago dying patients were shuffled down to the ends of hallways lest they remind doctors of their failure to cure. In the United States in which I live, we still do a pretty good job of trying to hide death in our culture. When I ask...

If you've been reading along in this blog or receiving my weekly Monday Morning Manna email.you know the the last months of 2019 were challenging for me. One of the very hardest challenges was going from a two dog household to a dog-less household in four short months.

Suddenly, my house seemed much too big and much too quiet. I was surrounded by the kind of support every grieving pet owner should have, but still, it was hard.

I told myself that it would make sense to get another dog In the spring.

You know how that goes.

I saw Bear's picture, following along with rapt attention while a little girl read to him. I talked with the owner of the rescue that had pulled him from the shelter. His short two years of life had been filled with the pain of abuse and the suffering of heart worm treatment.

And yet,, Bear just loves everyone. From the cashiers in the pet store to the children who live across the street, Bear approaches everyone with the same question: Can I love you? 

In...

An odd thing happened yesterday. 

I put butter on the counter, turned my back to get something else and returned to find… the butter was still there. This hasn’t happened in my house for a number of years.

Because of Ralphie, also known as Butter Boy. He loved his butter. He loved to steal it off the counter to eat it. And to bury the container in the yard only to dig it up and bring it back in later. 

It wasn’t just butter he buried. He didn’t care much for the dog food I got him not too long ago, but he swiped the cleaned-out can from the recycling and carried it for a couple of days like the Holy Grail. He then buried it, only to dig it up a few days later and deposit the can full of dirt on my freshly vacuumed rug.

It wasn’t just butter he loved and stole. Pretty much anything was fair game for him. I’d barely adopted him when I heard the swoosh of a rotisserie chicken being nabbed from the counter and taken through the dog door....

So what are we to make of Advent? 

We light the candles and talk about hope and peace and joy and love. In churches using the lectionary cycle of scriptures, ministers wrestle with how to fit a wild and fiery John the Baptist into a culture already moving to fa-la-la-las. 

We are more attuned to wish lists than longing. 

And yet, it is longing I feel most keenly in this season. I feel it in our beautifully crafted worship that has somehow given word and music to deep places of my soul. Come now, Prince of Peace, make us one body.*

Longing.

In the American culture in which I live, we don't much allow ourselves to get to the place of longing. There's always something to fill that space - some TV show, some food, some un-winnable  internet argument to distract us. If you want something that you don't have there are no less than fourteen self help books designed to help you get that very thing. 

Except soul longing doesn't lend itself to smart goals and lists of...

Following up with my doctor, I was trying to explain my month or so sojourn through an unnamed virus and two bouts of pneumonia. "I wasn't surprised when I got sick,"  I said. "The day before it started I'd put my 14 year old dog down." 

And it was the truth. I'd been stressed for weeks, trying to honor my promise to her not to keep her here too long but not being able to let go of a dog who greeted me with a smile every morning. Grief can hit us, body and soul, like a sledgehammer so I was completely unsurprised to wake up the next morning with a fever and sore throat.

"Yes," he said in response. "We tell ourselves not to be too upset about such things but we just can't help it."

I tell you God's honest truth: I had to fight with all the self control I posses not to go all Julia Sugerbaker on him.  In no way did I expect myself not to be upset, nor did I want to have a stiff upper lip. During a visit last Christmas my sister-in-law innocently inquired about...

"I learned to look at the pain, rather than hide from it. When I refused to look at it honestly, it grew like a shadow in a childhood bedroom. My pain seemed to sense fear; fear was the fuel it burned in order to run through me. To disarm it, to look at the pain honestly. took time. I had to learn to inhabit my body. It's a difficult thing to sit with pain and just be. To sit beside it, acknowledge it and be whole in its presence. to experience pain in that way, I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn't me. It was just a sensation.  I was bigger than the pain and I could withstand it, it wouldn't kill me. I would survive it." Dr. Rana Awdish, In Shock

I've been reading this exceptional book, In Shock. An ICU doctor,  Awdish was pregnant when things went horribly wrong. It's telling that I'm about halfway through the book. Awdish has been through critical illness, has been actively dying and now, after a very long journey, has returned to work. She still...

I recently listened to an episode of the "Outside" podcast (from Outside magazine) that took on the "Keto conundrum." If you're not familiar with it, the Keto diet (which many people swear by) is a very low carb, high fat diet. Athletes have long relied on carbs to fuel workouts and races, and studies have shown no benefit to a Keto diet for athletes. And yet, some athletes insisted that it was magic for them.

Canadian Race walker (don't snicker - he can complete a walking marathon faster than recreational runner can run it) Evan Dunfree participated in a study designed to address the question.  He was put into a group of endurance athletes who were put on a strictly monitored Keto diet. The only carbs allowed were the equivalent of a couple of bananas a day. 

He said that the training was brutal. Everything was just so hard. Some of the athlete in the Keto group struggled with depression as they made the switch. 

After a certain number of weeks he was...

As some of you know, I have an old dog named Oakley. She's pushing 90 in human years. When she was diagnosed with leukemia the vet said that with chemo, she could last another one and a half to two years.

That was one year, ten months ago. We're doing palliative care in bonus time now.

I had moment the other week when I thought we might be at that point, the point of the final goodbye. When she got up to greet me in the morning she could hardly move her old bones around and it broke my heart to see her. But the next morning she greeted me with a smile and begged to go on her walk.

Not yet. It's not yet time. Tweaking her treatment has made her almost frisky again.

So the other morning we were doing our slow stroll along the neighborhood streets. Out of the blue she stumbled and sat down in the grass next to the curb.

She does that sometimes now, when her weakened legs give out. She struggled unsuccessfully to get up. I patted her head and quietly told her that it was okay, she could...

As I write this, it's Pentecost Sunday. 

For what it's worth, Google search defines it as "the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension, held on the seventh Sunday after Easter."

I think a better definition is that it's when things got messy. 

Not that following Jesus wasn't messy. He had a way of not staying in his own lane, talking to the people he shouldn't, healing when he shouldn't and saying things that either made no sense at all or made way too much sense to be comfortable.

Pentecost pulls us all into the mess.

When there's one right way to think about God, to speak about God or to worship God, well then, we can control that. We have standards.

When there's one right group of people to testify about God, well then, we can control that as well. If you don't meet the qualifications you'll be silenced.

Then comes Pentecost, and this messy Spirit of God that spills out all over everywhere. It's so out...