While We Still Have Breath

Dear Reader,

I began this writing with what seemed to be a random collection of thoughts:

one life → a flowing river → unnecessary pebbles → breath → gratitude and praise.

At first, I wondered whether they really belonged together. The more I reflected, however, the more I began to see a single message running through them.

There are words often attributed to Confucius:

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

For me, those words point toward a moment of awakening—the realization that mortal life is finite. There is no second earthly life waiting somewhere beyond this one. There is simply this journey, stretching from birth until we return to dust.

At some point in my own journey, I began to understand the difference between simply existing and truly living.

For me, living became increasingly connected with charity, service, gratitude, and love for others.

Yet this new way of living did not mean that life suddenly became predictable or unchanged.

Heraclitus gave us the wonderful image:

“You cannot step into the same river twice.”

Yesterday's river is gone, and in a sense, yesterday's version of ourselves is gone as well. Life keeps moving. Circumstances change. People enter and leave our lives. Day becomes night, and night becomes another morning—but the new day is never exactly the same as the one before it.

The question, then, is not whether life will change.

The question is: What will I do with the life flowing through my hands today?

A second lesson I have learned is that a new life does not necessarily mean a perfect life.

The road may become smoother, yet some of us still carry sand in our socks.

Muhammad Ali expressed this wonderfully:

“It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe.”

In my own experience, some of those pebbles came from the wreckage of my past.

I needed to make amends. I needed to repay financial obligations. I needed to humble myself before former wives and my son and acknowledge places where my actions had caused pain.

Those things were not easy.

Yet in doing them, something began to change. It was almost as though I had finally stopped along the road, washed my feet, removed the stones, and put on better boots for the journey ahead.

Slowly, I discovered that I did not have to spend the remainder of my life being held back by resentment, old regrets, something someone once said, or fear of what tomorrow might bring.

And that brings me to a third lesson: gratitude.

Psalm 150 closes with one of the simplest and most beautiful invitations in scripture:

“Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.”

While I still have breath, I still have something for which to be grateful.

Today, as I try to express that gratitude through service and love for others, this life feels more whole. I feel more firmly anchored. I have begun to experience something I can only describe as living the air—recognizing the gift of simply being here, breathing, serving, loving, learning, and becoming.

The river still changes.

There are still stones along the road.

There are still days when the current carries me somewhere I did not expect to go.

But increasingly, I trust that the journey has purpose.

Sir Walter Scott once wrote:

“Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.”

Perhaps we need not wait for January to experience a new year.

Perhaps a new year can begin on any morning when we awaken and recognize that we have been given another day.

Another river.

Another opportunity to remove a pebble.

Another chance to love someone.

Another breath with which to praise God.

Dear Reader, while we still have breath, may we not merely exist.

May we live.

May we serve.

May we love.

And may we be grateful for the river carrying us home.

Amen

🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️

When Good People Suffer

Reflections on the Book of Job

Dear Reader,

Lately I have been reflecting on the book of Job. As I have done so, I have also found myself relating Job’s experience to the loss of my mother when I was 20 years old. That was a time when I chose to blame God and abandon the religion of my childhood.

Like Job, I was spiritually troubled. At the time, I was deeply involved in my church and in its teachings about physical healing through faith. I believed I was a good person—honest, faithful, and devoted to God. By the usual reasoning of the world, I felt I should have been protected from great tragedy.

To me, there seemed to be a kind of universal law: that good deeds produce good lives—lives of security, blessing, and peace.

So when loss came my way, part of me became convinced that either I had failed in my prayers or there was no God in the universe who truly cared. Perhaps the greater wound was the thought that some unknown sin in my childhood may have somehow blocked my mother’s healing.

That way of thinking is not far from the thinking found in the book of Job.

Even Job’s friends tried to explain his suffering by insisting that he must have done something wrong. In their minds, suffering had to be punishment, because their understanding of God left little room for anything else.

To Job’s credit, he refused to fit neatly into that kind of thinking.

For many of us, there is comfort in believing life follows a simple pattern: if we are good, good will come to us; if we are unfaithful, hardship will follow. There is some truth in the idea that wise choices often lead to better outcomes. Yet the book of Job reminds us that this is not the whole story. Life is not always a straight line between virtue and reward.

Sometimes sorrow comes without asking permission.

Sometimes pain enters a life that has tried to be kind, faithful, and sincere.

Sometimes the righteous suffer not because God has abandoned them, but because mortality itself is far more mysterious than we wish it to be.

I do not believe the message of Job is that suffering is good, or that evil and goodness are equal forces that must be kept in balance. Rather, I believe the book invites us into a deeper understanding: God is Lord not only over what we call blessings, but also over a world in which agency, loss, uncertainty, and grief are real.

That is not always easy to accept.

We naturally want life to make immediate sense. We want a universe that rewards decency on schedule and explains every wound in language we can understand. Job teaches otherwise. He reminds us that God’s wisdom is greater than our formulas.

Perhaps that is one reason the Lord answers Job not with a simple explanation, but with a vision of a creation far larger than Job could grasp. The message seems to be that human beings see only a fragment, while God sees the whole.

This does not erase sorrow. It does not make pain pleasant. It does not mean that every tragedy was individually arranged for a hidden lesson. But it does suggest that the presence of suffering does not prove the absence of God.

To me, one of the great truths in Job is this: faith is not a contract by which we purchase a trouble-free life. Faith is a relationship of trust with God, even when life becomes difficult to understand.

Job begins by trusting God while his life is blessed. He ends by seeking God in the middle of mystery. That may be the greater faith.

There are moments in all of our lives when the old formulas no longer work. A prayer seems unanswered. A loss feels undeserved. A burden arrives that cannot be explained by fairness. At such times, the book of Job asks us to let go of the belief that righteousness guarantees immunity from pain.

Instead, it invites us to hold to something deeper:

that God remains God,
that truth remains truth,
and that our suffering, though not always explained, is never beyond His sight.

I believe one of the hidden gifts of Job is that it moves us from asking, “What did I do to deserve this?” to asking, “How shall I walk with God through this?”

That is a harder question, but perhaps a holier one.

The wisdom of Job may be that life cannot always be measured by reward and punishment. Some things remain mysterious. Some sorrows remain unresolved for a season. Yet even there, God has not lost His integrity, nor has He surrendered His place over all things.

And perhaps that is enough for today:

not to understand everything,
but to trust that we are not abandoned within what we do not understand.

The Wisdom of Silence

 

Dear Reader,

While reading several texts this morning, I began forming a quotation that expressed how I feel about chatter, wisdom, social media, and our noisy world. The following quotation is my contribution:

“The wisdom of the sage is seldom known, for silence is the sage’s favorite tool.”

At first, I wondered whether silence could truly be called a tool. For much of the world, isn't wisdom something we share by speaking? Yet the more I reflected, the more I realized that nearly every great spiritual tradition teaches us to value restraint, listening, and stillness.

Lao Tzu wrote that those who truly know have little need to prove it with words. Confucius taught that the noble person is modest in speech but abundant in action. The Stoics encouraged discipline in speech and careful attention to what we hear. James in the New Testament reminds us to be “swift to hear, slow to speak.” Even the Lord often teaches His children not through thunder, but through “a still small voice.”

In my experience, silence is never truly empty; it can become the workshop where wisdom is formed and refined.

For example, in my own life, the people who have influenced me most were rarely the loudest in the room. They did not rush to offer advice or dominate every conversation. Instead, they listened with genuine interest. They asked thoughtful questions. They allowed another person the dignity of discovering truth rather than forcing it upon them.

Their silence spoke volumes!

Through recovery and grace, I have witnessed that the most meaningful conversations often begin only after someone has finished speaking. There is a brief pause—a moment when no one feels compelled to fill the silence. In that space, understanding often arrives. Sometimes a heart softens. Sometimes a tear is shed. Sometimes God quietly enters the conversation.

I sometimes wonder whether our world has become uncomfortable with silence.

We surround ourselves with music, television, podcasts, notifications, and endless opinions. Rarely are we simply still. Yet if every quiet moment is filled with noise, how will we hear the whisperings of the Spirit?

I am reminded of a line by Mary Baker Eddy in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (p. 210): “It is plain that nothing can be added to the mind already full.” She was speaking of a mind filled with Truth and Love. Her words also caused me to wonder what happens when our minds are filled instead with noise, distraction, and endless opinion.

How will we recognize the gentle impressions that invite us to become kinder, more forgiving, or more willing to trust God if we are unwilling to become quiet and allow the Spirit to enter our meditations?

Silence is not merely the absence of sound. It is the presence of attention.

For me today, it is where listening becomes deeper than hearing, where prayer becomes more than speaking, and where wisdom has room to grow.

Perhaps that is why the sage treasures silence.

Not because the sage has nothing to say…

But because the sage has learned that some of life’s greatest truths are not spoken at all—they are received.

Hush for a moment, my friends, and find a little quiet today. Trust that God often speaks most clearly when our hearts become still.

🙏  🧘‍♂️  💕  🤗  ☮️

Keep Walking. Keep Sharing, Keep Learning

Dear Reader,

This morning, two quotations found their way into my reading. Though written centuries apart, they seem to express the same truth.

“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.”
— Confucius

And:

“It is by teaching that we teach ourselves.”
— Henri Frédéric Amiel

At first glance, each author's words speak of different things. One is about perseverance. The other is about teaching. Yet I believe they describe the same path.

In my experience, many of us measure life's progress by comparing ourselves with those around us. We notice how quickly others recover, learn, forgive, and move forward. In those moments, it is easy to become discouraged by the pace of our own journey.

I believe that, at such times, God is less concerned with our speed than with our direction.

As children, we learn to walk without apologizing for taking small steps. Every prayer, every act of kindness, every attempt to forgive, every effort to begin again is another step toward becoming the person God intends us to be.

We may feel unqualified. We may believe we have little to offer. Yet as we share our experience, something remarkable happens. We discover that the lessons we thought we were giving become lessons we ourselves hear more clearly.

I have experienced this many times in recovery.

When we remain observant, we will often find, almost unexpectedly, someone walking beside us who is struggling with the very path we have already traveled.

When I sit with someone seeking hope, I often leave with greater hope myself. When I encourage another person to trust God one day at a time, I find my own faith renewed. The words I offer another have a way of quietly returning to my own heart.

To me that is one of God’s gentle miracles.

He allows us to become both student and teacher at the same time.

The Savior taught this principle perfectly. He invited His disciples to follow Him, and then He sent them to strengthen others. As they served, they grew. As they lifted others, their own discipleship deepened.

The same invitation is extended to each of us.

Keep walking, even if your steps seem small.

Keep sharing, even if you think your experience is ordinary.

You may discover that God is teaching two hearts at once.

With every step forward, and with every hand extended to another, He quietly continues His work within us both.

Perhaps one of life's greatest blessings is this: as we help expand another person's horizon, God quietly expands our own.

  🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️  

One Step, One Prayer

 

Dear Reader,

This afternoon, I was looking through some old images from a year ago. I came across this one and wondered what message it might hold for my spiritual journey.

In my experience, my recovery journey has rarely allowed me to see the complete path ahead. For example, I would never have imagined that after my husband of thirty-three years passed away, my Higher Power—the God of my understanding—would bless me with two young men as housemates who treat and honor me as an elder member of their own family.

Yet that is exactly where the path of my life has brought me today.

Perhaps that is the point: the journey does not ask us to understand the entire path. It asks only that we keep walking, one honest step at a time.

As I lingered with the image, I began to see life patterned after the river. Like the water, we move among the stones and hazards before us. We may flow around them, rise above them, or gradually allow them to reshape the direction of our lives.

For me, God’s grace has guided me through places I once believed impassable. The journey has not always been easy to navigate, yet with every bend and with every rise and fall of the land, I have been given enough strength to continue onward—to, as scripture teaches, “endure to the end.”

In truth, my river has encountered few great waterfalls or thundering gorges. Many of its rapids have been quieter—almost silent surrenders of the heart. With a whispered prayer and a willingness to trust, I have seldom been stopped by an occasional clump of brush or a fallen tree. At times I have been slowed, and at other times redirected, but the current has continued.

More importantly, I testify that I have never fully felt alone.

Jesus taught that if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, we may say to the mountain, “Remove hence,” and it shall be moved.

Spiritually, I do not believe this always means that the mountain will disappear. Sometimes it means that God’s grace will reveal a passage around it, provide the strength to climb it, or redirect the channel of our lives.

As we listen for the peace of the still, small voice, our Heavenly Father and His Son can guide our course and take the oars when our own strength begins to fail.

Today, this once-forgotten image speaks to me of releasing fear, receiving the light before us, and trusting the Power that carries the river—and carries us too.

One step. One prayer. One day at a time.

Amen

🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️

Light, Letter by Letter

 

An Acrostic Thought

Dear Reader,

This morning I learned something interesting about Psalm 37. It is written as an acrostic poem. In the original Hebrew, each section begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

The pattern is largely hidden when the psalm is translated into English, yet the purpose remains beautiful. The writer carefully arranged each thought, letter by letter, creating order in a world that often appears disorderly.

It caused me to wonder whether God may be doing something similar with our lives.

From where we stand, many of our experiences seem disconnected. We see moments of happiness, periods of sorrow, unexpected changes, unanswered prayers, mistakes, relationships, losses, and new beginnings. They may appear to be scattered fragments without any clear pattern.

Yet perhaps God sees the complete poem.

To express this thought, I have chosen the word LIGHT.

L — Let go of what you cannot control.

Psalm 37 begins with the counsel, “Fret not thyself because of evildoers.” In other words, do not allow the actions of others or the unfairness of life to consume your peace.

This does not mean that pain or injustice should be ignored. It means that we do not have to surrender our hearts to worry, resentment, or fear.

Sometimes letting go is not giving up. It is placing what we cannot carry into the hands of God.

I — Invite God into the unfinished places.

Many of us would prefer to approach God after we have repaired ourselves. We may believe that we must first overcome our weaknesses, resolve our doubts, or become more worthy of His attention.

Yet God does not wait for the poem to be completed before entering our lives.

He meets us in the unfinished lines.

He comes to us while we are still learning, struggling, grieving, questioning, and becoming. Grace is not merely the reward at the end of our journey. Grace is the strength that carries us through it.

G — Grow through what you experience.

Not every experience is good, but God can bring goodness from every experience we place in His hands.

Recovery has taught me that even regret may become wisdom. Loneliness may deepen compassion. Failure may produce humility. Grief may teach us how to sit quietly beside another person who is hurting.

The painful chapters of our lives do not have to be wasted chapters.

God can transform them into words of understanding, patience, and love.

H — Hold fast to hope.

Psalm 37 repeatedly reminds us to trust, wait, and remain faithful.

Waiting can be difficult because we rarely see the entire pattern while it is being written. We may see only one letter, one line, or one difficult season.

Hope allows us to believe that God is still writing.

The present moment may not explain the past, and it may not reveal the future, but it can still become a place of faith.

T — Trust the Author.

An acrostic poem is not a random collection of words. Each line has a place within a larger design.

Perhaps the same is true of our lives.

We may not understand why certain events were permitted, why some prayers were answered differently than we expected, or why people we loved could not remain with us. Trust does not require us to pretend that these experiences did not hurt.

Trust simply says:

“I cannot yet see the whole poem, but I believe God has not abandoned the page.”

Dear Reader, perhaps your life feels incomplete today. A line may seem broken. A chapter may feel out of order. You may be standing between what has ended and what has not yet begun.

Do not lose heart.

God may be arranging something you cannot yet recognize.

Letter by letter, experience by experience, He can bring light from darkness, purpose from pain, and hope from what once appeared meaningless.

We see only a few unfinished lines.

God sees the entire poem.

  🙏🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️  

The Courage to Endure, the Wisdom to Change

 

Dear Reader, 

Today, I would like to reflect on two quotations from my daily readings:

“But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
—Ernest Hemingway

And:

“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
—Confucius

At first, these statements may appear strikingly contradictory.

Hemingway encourages us to remain unconquered—to hold firmly to something within ourselves that suffering cannot destroy.

Confucius reminds us that life requires change. Unless we possess perfect wisdom, refusing to change may not be strength at all. It may simply be pride, fear, or stubbornness.

I can look back upon times when I needed to persevere through a programming assignment even though I felt physically and mentally exhausted. The result was a system that allowed cargo to move from shipside to land transportation with little or no written paperwork.

I can also remember times when feeling unconquerable caused me to push my coding abilities beyond my training. My pride and stubbornness nearly cost me the project—and possibly my employment.

Both experiences required determination, but only one was guided by wisdom.

For me, the common thread between these quotations is found in learning the difference between perseverance and resistance.

We do not need to lose a relationship simply to prove that we are right or to win an argument. Standing firm is not always prudent when our choices may affect our health, a cherished dream, or our relationship with a loving partner or child.

Humility allows us to acknowledge our wounds without allowing those wounds to define us. Through humility, we can rise again, learn again, and rediscover hope in the grace of God.

During difficult times, I have found it helpful to become still before God and release old opinions, familiar resentments, and unhealthy habits. In such moments, holding on may not represent strength or honor. It may instead reveal pride, selfishness, or fear.

Sometimes our greatest victory comes from refusing to give up.

At other times, victory comes from admitting that our present way of thinking is no longer leading us toward peace, truth, or spiritual growth.

Recovery has taught me that surrender is not defeat.

Faith has taught me that change is not weakness.

The challenge is knowing which moment we are facing.

What within me must remain steadfast?

What within me must be willing to change?

The Serenity Prayer expresses this balance beautifully:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”

The bridge between Hemingway and Confucius is found in that final phrase:

The wisdom to know the difference.

We are not made for defeat—but neither are we made to remain unchanged.

God does not ask us to surrender our hope. He asks us to surrender whatever prevents hope from transforming us.

May we have the courage to endure what life places before us, the humility to change what God reveals within us, and the wisdom to recognize the difference.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please share in the comments any experiences that have helped you understand when to stand firm and when to let go.

🙏🏻🧘‍♂️💕🤗☮️