Inspirations and Illuminations

This morning, our worship service opened with "When Morning Gilds the Skies."  Each Sunday, before the service begins, I scan the worship bulletin, opening the hymnal to the first hymn, writing the title of the sermon and the scriptures in my sermon notebook, and getting an idea of the flow of the service.  When one of my favorite hymns is in the bulletin, it gives me something to look forward to; when there's a hymn printed, it's usually a familiar tune with new lyrics that better follow the theme of the service than the original lyrics, but sometimes it's something completely unfamiliar to me, and I can sing (or whistle) through it ahead of time so I know what's coming.  On occasion, though, my response is, "Oh, great."  There are some songs I just can't stand, for whatever reason.  Sometimes it's because the words are meaningless or confusing to me.  Sometimes it's because the melody is practically unsingable.  Other times, it's be...

I'm in the middle of watching Steel Magnolias for the xth time.  There's a soft spot in my heart for this movie.  It came out when I was in college, in very-small-town Illinois.  At the time, there were only two theaters at our local movie house, and movies were cheap.  So I saw a lot of movies at that time, and Steel Magnolias is one that is burned into my memory.   First of all, there were only five people in the theater for this showing, all of us students at (then) Lincoln Christian College.  Four of us were girls, and one was the boyfriend of one of the girls.  It always feels special to be one of only a few at a movie, and this was an unexpected treat.  The movie was great, and we all left the theater reciting lines, like "He doesn't know whether to wind his butt or scratch his watch," or "Hit her!" or "If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me" or "I'm not crazy, I've just been in a very bad mo...

Today is day 85 in a row I've written something intentional.  I started at the beginning of Lent, using the United Methodist Church's Lenten Word-of-the-Day.  Starting on Ash Wednesday, I wrote daily reflections on the words, usually with a spiritual bent, and included a stock photo evocative of the word or concept.  Some days the words flowed easily, filled with alliteration and imagery, surprising myself with the insights that just came to me with very little effort.  Some days were a struggle, with verbs that would have been better in their adjective form, or plurals that would have been easier to write about in the singular; or words that I needed the dictionary to clarify.  The thesaurus was my best friend, and many times song lyrics said it better than I could.  Ultimately, though, I found I really enjoyed the discipline, and have continued it in the weeks since Easter, coming up with my own topics or words some days, and getting input from friends fo...

Here's a special little insight into my life:  I don't sleep well.  I mean, I'm not good at sleeping.  55 years on the planet, and I still can't seem to get it.  It's not full-on insomnia.  I can sleep, and I sleep deeply, but I just don't sleep very long at a time.  If I turn out the light at 9, I'm awake between 3 and 4.  The alarm is set for 5, but I rarely need it unless I happen to fall back asleep after 30-40 minutes of being awake.  And usually I don't.   So this morning, I woke up at around 4 and got on my tablet to do today's Wordle.  Facebook was up, so I briefly checked a couple of things before moving over to the NYT site.  No internet.  Weird.  I checked my Wi-Fi, tried to turn it off and back on, but nothing.  No problem, I can play my logic puzzles and see if the internet comes back in a little bit.   A couple minutes after I noticed the internet was down, I heard the sounds of a big truc...

Trigger warning:  I'm not all that keen on the Beatles.  There.  I said it.  I'll go one step further:  I think they're mostly overrated.  Don't get me wrong, they did some pretty great songs, and there's no question how influential they were on the music scene at the time, all the way up to today.  They were a boy band, but unlike those of the 90s, they actually played their own instruments.  They wrote their own stuff.  And they were ridiculously prolific, especially considering how short a time they were together.  Like, crazy prolific.  But, in my humble opinion, for every great song they produced, there were probably three that were "meh" at best and pretty crappy at worst.   And, of course, the end of the Beatles paved the way for Paul McCartney and Wings.  Now there's a band I can get excited about.  I remember hearing "Band on the Run" on the radio when I was a kid, and seeing the scene in the James Bond ...

It's the first morning of 2026.  For many of us, the start of a new year is the opportunity to shake off the dust from the previous year, and to look forward with hope to the promise of a clean slate.  It's like opening a new notebook, with all those blank pages and the possibilities they represent.  We resolve to get fit, to learn something new, to be different and better.  We choose a word of the year, with the idea that everything we experience in that year will in some way reflect that word in a positive way.   Frankly, most of the time, none of that pans out.  I don't remember what my word of the year was for 2025, although I'm sure if I go back to my first blog of the year it'll be there.  I probably had several goals for 2025, but the only one I achieved was to read at least 52 books in the year (I did 63, plus the short Bible books I didn't count in the number).  I didn't finish any cross stitch projects except the yearly Christmas or...