“When you go in search of honey, you must expect to be stung by bees.” —Joseph Joubert Read more »

Working at Greensboro Health Care Center, a nursing home, was a rewarding experience for me in many ways. Read more »

In Lewis Carrol’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice is talking with the White Queen, who lives in a backwards world where effects happen before their cause. Read more »

Back when I was still new to Texas I met up with black eyed peas for the first time. I was not impressed. Read more »

In February of 2015 I went to the Unitarian Universalist Minister’s Association Institute for Excellence in Ministry, and I had the opportunity to spend a week in a workshop with activist, eco‐philosopher, writer, and spiritual elder Joanna Macy. Read more »

“Nourish beginnings… Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” —Seneca

When your child or infant is in the hospital, ill or injured, you may feel like all of life’s “knowns” are turned upside down. Suddenly unmoored, you may be struggling… Read more »

A disaster strikes fiercely and suddenly. It shatters our homes and property. It puts an end to many community services. It plays havoc with our interiors. A disaster leads people into and through stages of despair. Our once-so-comfortable-existence is replaced with anger, grief, frustration, and confusion. Looking back, I now see this after the disaster ...Read more »

For the first couple of months after I found AA I looked around to see if I could find a program without this kind of God language. With time I realized … Read more »

Illness, including mental illness, is nothing for which an individual should be blamed or shamed. But doesn’t our UU theology hold a fuller revelation? Read more »

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. (Rom 12:9-10) Read more »

We UUs value knowledge; we believe in facing the facts and tackling problems rationally. The human psyche does not always cooperate, however. What do we do when irrational—perhaps nonrational—fears seize us and send us running from the knowledge? Read more »

When we become ill, we discover what it means to be a human “being” as opposed to a human “doing.” Read more »

Unitarian Universalists hold justice to be a particularly important aspect of right relationships among human beings. But how can we temper justice with mercy? Read more »

Mental illness, like our faith, is a journey with no definitive answers and no correct path. Our illnesses demand a lot from us. There are no universally guaranteed medications or treatments; we must find what works for us. Read more »

If we look beneath memory loss and the inability to reason, we may be surprised to discover what persons with Alzheimer’s reveal to us … Read more »

For many of us, it proves impossible to limit religious thought to a narrow creed. The more we learn, the more difficult it becomes to restrict ourselves to the definition of ultimate reality, or God, that we grew up with, or held when we were young. Read more »

Caregivers often must put the rest of their lives on hold to attend to the sick child. But those of us in that role must also take care of ourselves so that we are strengthened to give that care. Read more »

What do we want for our children? Love and happiness, perhaps, are a good place to start. Read more »

Rather than seeing new babies as tainted by original sin, we see them as whole and beautiful, just as they are. Read more »

Whether we suspected it was coming or were taken completely by surprise, we have lost a job and we are likely stunned. In most cases it is not because we did something wrong and are being punished. Read more »

Many of us have long since mastered the art of despair. Many of us have fallen into despair’s trance, memorized by thoughts of suicide. Read more »

Optimism is often held up as a cardinal virtue. No matter the situation, we feel we should be plucky, searching for that silver lining, and courageous. Yet… Read more »