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Lawns, mothers, children and rough Mother’s Days

It was Mother’s Day on Sunday in North America, and on my walk yesterday I ruminated over the dark side of the day that I kept bumping up against over the weekend. The father of young children whose mother died too soon. Her young boys braced for a Mother’s Day where the empty space where […]

Kids know: Sharing and including is <em>way </em>more fun

A surprising lesson from a kids game: I played musical chairs with my Sunday school kids in two ways. First the traditional version with chairs numbering one less than the players participating arranged, music played, and when the music stopped the children scrambled to claim a chair. One sad-faced child did not find a seat […]

Time . . . because will you see the next sunset?

We have an art gallery in our church. A recent display featured the work of Leonard Minni, an artist who lived in Rwanda before during and after the 1994 genocide. He visited our congregation to tell us about the theme for his exhibition: Time. The crowd listened in awed silence as he told us that […]

Phases of our lives that happen to someone else

Our car pulled up at the end of the long rural driveway that leads to the farm I lived on for the first sixteen years of my life. As I looked over the property, the nooks and crannies of the place felt both intimately familiar to the marrow of my bones and foreign at the […]

The love in a name

The newel knob of our banister is a catch-all for items of clothing, headphones and strappy purses. Yesterday, those items coincidentally fell into place so it looked like we had a new family member. I posted the picture on my Facebook feed and immediately received suggestions to give our creation a name. All of us picked up […]

Arlene Somerton Smith

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