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What Our Childhood Memories Reveal
Memories act as markers for our lives, and our first ones often reveal a lot about how we see the world. What you make of your childhood makes you, I believe. One of my first vivid memories involves a small house I lived in at the age of three or four. We lived in Colorado at the time and were quite poor as my parents attended graduate school. I would walk up and down the block and once knocked on a neighbor’s door to see if she had any children. I remember her house as pink and her hair as brown laced with silver. She had no children and clearly…
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Mindfulness and Discernment: Make the Connection
Hannah Whitall Smith, a Quaker from the mid nineteenth century, once said, “Mind the checks.” I respect this advice deeply, mainly as a result of not minding the checks. I once took a personality test that was supposed to determine who in the Bible my personality was most like. Unlike the phony Facebook tests that determine which Disney princess you should have as your maid of honor, this test based itself on the Meyers Briggs personality test. How exactly its authors determined the results for the men and women in the Bible, I do not know. However, my test resulted in a certain similarity to Joshua, who was brave and somewhat…
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In Defense of the Gift of Emotion
*I am reposting this blog about emotion because of a contemptuous response I recently received on Twitter. They castigated me for my post about feelings and positive thinking, informing me that being a Christian is about having faith, not feelings. I chose not to respond to them, but my heart often breaks for Christians who feel they must cut off their emotional lives. No wonder our art is not longer the driving force in the world, as it used to be. Emotions certainly must be filtered and examined. But in the end, while love is a decision, it is also a feeling. I wouldn’t marry a man who did not…
Healing Through Art & Words
