NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

“There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying - which it should be. The danger of old age is that we may start acting old.”  - Joan D. Chittister February is my birthday month, and so I received a birthday card in the mail. Nothing strange or odd about that! What does strike me as different though is that I was bothered by that card and its message ' The secret to staying young? Lie about your age.'   [In fact it bothered me so much, it almost ended up in the recycling with its envelope.]  So I asked myself, ‘Why?’ In retrospect, I have had a good life, with many positives to look back on. But I have no desire to become that person again. And this I think is why this unfortunate choice for a birthday card had such a negative effect on me. Our culture today seems to revere the young. Yes, they do have more energy, more vim, vigour, and vitali

As I was sitting in my chair this morning, finishing the first cup of coffee for the day, I was feeling sorry for myself. After all I had gotten up extra early when the alarm went off at 7:30 am, because service men were scheduled to arrive sometime between 8:30 and noon. They were coming to fix a ‘first world’ problem, the remote control was no longer ‘talking’ to our fireplace.  Poor me!!! Of course we weren’t without the auxiliary heat the fireplace provides in our apartment on the lower level of the house. I could still turn it on and off manually. As I said, it was a first world problem! This quote from the poem ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire, a London-based Somali writer, poet, editor and teacher, first came to my attention when the picture of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background who drowned on 2 September 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea. He and his family were Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe amid the European refugee crisis.  “you have to u

 I wanted to write last week about what was happening in the United States because of the executive order banning refugees from those seven countries. But there was so much wrong with what I was seeing that I didn’t know where to begin. Then these arrived in my inbox from “Sojourners, Voice & Verse”, which daily pairs up a biblical verse with a quote from a current source and then its both into the perspective of prayer. Verse of the day “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”        -1 John 4:16 Voice of the day “True love breathes salvation back into me.” - Beyoncé Prayer of the day Root us in your grace, Jesus. Let it lead us in all that we do.   They were for me, at that particular time, just what I needed to hear. I needed to be reminded that love is what God is, that love is what makes me whole, that that love is to be found in the teachings of Jesus. It was as if someone had said the words “Whoa, steady there. T

‘ God created human beings; he created them godlike, Reflecting God's nature. He created them male and female.  God blessed them: "Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth. ”’ Genesis1:27-28 [The Message Bible] The 11pm news begins each night with the word ‘Trump’, to be followed by the news of more executive orders being signed by president Trump:  allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to proceed, withdrawing from the TPP, advancing construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, paving the way to build the Mexican wall, etc., etc. This is a man who is first and foremost interested in the bottom line. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked over the 20,000 for the first time on January 25 because of those orders, it was obvious that  many others agreed with him. I found myself thinking that all was lost, that my grandchildren and their children would inheri