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“It’s about healing your own soul first, so that you don’t become the evil you abhor.” — Bishop Gretchen Rehberg Many attended yesterday's Spirit of America service in Cashmere. Yesterday I sat with perhaps two hundred or more others at the 9/11 Spirit of America Memorial here in Cashmere, Washington. Twenty-five years have passed since September 11, 2001. Some of us can remember exactly where we were when we first heard the news. (One of our sons was in New York; we were hor

“Look carefully at the people who are truly flourishing. They may not be the people you expected.”— A contemporary paraphrase of Jesus’ Beatitudes Enjoying food with friends after church; how would they feel about a program which called people from Kyrgyzstan our "Muslim neighbors"? I was enjoying food with a group of women after church last Sunday when our conversation turned briefly to Kyrgyzstan. John is returning tomorrow from traveling there with our neighbor Randy Smith

“Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer them with love.” — Mahatma Gandhi It happened at our simple and popular community dinner Thursday night. The Seventh Day Adventists served their signature vegetarian “haystacks.” Usually it’s an easy-going, if a little rowdy, environment. That’s how these things often begin—not in lecture halls or debates, but at long tables where people come carrying their fully human selves. John had sat down with a young woman and her

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.” — Blaise Pascal How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change. (Old joke, I use it a lot.) Several days ago one of my granddaughters announced, with the calm confidence only a young person can possess, that she intended to drive about fifteen hours by herself ac

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies...Abraham Lincoln. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not...

"Be curious, not judgmental." (perhaps falsely attributed to Walt Whitman, poet; endorsed by Ted Lasso, me, and my compassion circle)...