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Showing posts from August, 2013

Touching Home Base

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Over ten years ago, during the most difficult part of my career as a parish pastor, I took a quick summer trip back East with my two young children to visit my family. We flew in, and my parents picked us up from the airport. Toward the end of that visit, I coerced my parents into taking the 100 mile trip from their home to the town of my childhood. Though we had talked about it weeks before on the telephone (and what seemed at the time, promises were made), it took several tries before I could get at least one of them to agree to go along. I'd love to see Fairfield again, I said. I haven't been back since high school, over 30 years ago. As I talked, I could see from their faces that my desire struck them as odd. Though my grandparents on my mother's side had continued to live there long after we left, and lived in their home until their deaths many, many years later, the relatively close town of my childhood held little interest for my parents. I pushed. Finally we agree

"I Forgot My Phone" : short film

Yes, I believe many of us are more smitten with our smartphones than each other. I'm wondering when that will finally feel painful enough to control ourselves. Not soon enough.
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Getting the Love You Want : A Guide for Couples by Harville Hendrix My rating: 3 of 5 stars 3.5 stars Hendrix and I have preaching and church ministry as a young adult in common. I love this about him. What I don't love is that his psychology model is born of psychoanalytic and Freudian models. He believes that we marry unconsciously to heal the wounds that our early lives have inflicted upon us, and that good marriages heal those wounds. I believe instead that we marry others who feel instinctively familiar, like family, to us. In both good and bad ways. And that is our own work, our individual, relational and spiritual work, to heal our wounds. I think that is too heavy a load to lay on one relationship, particularly your spouse! I am indebted to him, however, for teaching us/me the Imago Dialogue model. I use it almost daily in my practice to slow partners down, get them to listen to each other without reflexive defense, problem solving or arguing points of fact. It's the

Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Must

Today in Minnesota was a milestone day : it's the first day that marriage for gay and lesbian couples became legal in our state. In courthouses, hotel lobbies, and backyards around the state couples who have waited for years, sometimes decades, recited vows, were blessed and declared spouses. It is a day of great joy in so many lives! It's expected by those in the know that hundreds of new marriages of same-sex couples will be taking place in the weeks to come, and I say God Bless every one of them with a long and happy life together. But, should there be any same-sex couple that in spite of all the joy around them, is tense, uncertain and uneasy, I hope they also hear this message somehow: just because you can, doesn't mean you must. Gay and lesbian couples have all the same challenges that heterosexual couples have. But they also have a huge, additional stress: that of being part of a discriminated minority group. At the last big social survey, about 3-5% of the popul