When I was a teenager, my parents became Amway distributors. This was an interesting turn of events, especially for my father who was a dedicated college professor on the weekdays and a pro-worthy golfer on the weekends. I’m not entirely sure what inspired this shift, but they were good at it. Dad put his exceptional...
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A friend of mine who has a PhD in counseling told me that joy is the emotion that is hardest for us to let ourselves experience. We rarely let ourselves do joy well. Living with joy is hard. I know I’m a lot better at living out of duty, or fear, or effort — or...
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Epiphany begins with speaking God’s name, Immanuel, “God with us,” in its fullness. For it is when the savior has come. The king of the universe doesn’t sit on a throne, but lays in the poverty and ordinariness of a manger. He doesn’t come to us wearing a robe and a crown, but instead wears...
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Like many, many others, I have long loved the work of children’s author and illustrator Tomie De Paola, and particularly how he includes insights into his Italian heritage and his vibrant Catholic faith through simple story-telling. A Mormon friend introduced me to his book The Clown of God, which ably introduces the concept of vocation...
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Shadow and light. Watching the mysterious interplay between the sky and the grass, the trees and the flowers, I found myself thinking about the way shadow and light makes its way through life for every one of us. We live amidst both glories and ruins, all day long having to make sense of the very...
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This past holiday season, I had the joy of performing one of life’s most satisfying but irritating tasks: stringing up Christmas lights. The frustration begins right off the bat with figuring out how to untangle them. Then, you need to make sure they all work (because there is always that one broken bulb that ruins the...
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