Smoldering Wick

Greetings friends -- Last Friday I spent a few extra hours at the office dotting all my i's and crossing all my t's ensuring that I'd be able to take off all of this week. As I cleared my desk, set my out-of-office email response and voicemail, I could feel the weight of a very busy autumn at work falling from my shoulders. I got in the car, started it, turned on the heat and let the engine warm. Chopin's nocturnes came on automatically when I plugged in my phone. The haunting beauty of those slow, fragile melodies filled the atmosphere. I closed my eyes for a minute and absorbed it, breathing the beauty, freedom and peace. As I drove through the snow and dimming light of early evening in the Northwoods, I turned the gaze of my heart and mind homeward. Nine days with Stephanie, John Paul and James Henry lay before me. My favorite thing in the world is getting to do life with Stephanie and the boys -- drinking coffee and praying early in the morning, cooking and ...

Wow. So that was a bit of hiatus… That’s the funny thing about blogs – at least for me – no matter how good the posts are and no matter how consistent they are for a time, I always find myself thinking, “We all know this is just a fad and it’s going to peter out and this blog will eventually just be another URL consigned to the scrapheap of history like Furbies and Billy the Singing Wall-mount Bass. But I digress… Earlier this week I was cleaning my desk at home and rediscovered my 2018 goals. I made about eight or so goals back around New Years and I’m killing it on approximately two of them. The others not so much. One of them, if you’ll recall, was to read 12 books this year and to use my blog as a way of processing and sharing what I am reading. Well, let’s just say that this goal hasn’t proven to be one of the two that I’m succeeding at. But we’re all about second chances, right? Well, over the past few weeks I read two books, one was a Eric Metaxas's biography of the grea...