Pause+Pray

Reflect In her late 70s, my mother once said, “Growing old is not for the feint-hearted.” The greatest emotional/spiritual challenge of growing old is fear. Some fear the afterlife. Others fear the process of dying. Most fear becoming disabled to ...

Reflect The past few years have been difficult for us all. There have been many instances when we have found ourselves wading in the high waters, looking out in the fog, hoping and praying for land on the horizon—for a ...

Reflect Today’s moral dualism and tribalism fuels media traffic, political campaigns, and ultimately leads to caricaturing, labeling, and overgeneralizing people who are different from ourselves. St. Francis also navigated a divided age yet was stirred to embrace the “other,” for ...

Reflect Wide-open spaces have captured the minds of humans for millenia—the Grand Canyon, the Sahara Desert, the Great Plains, the shores of a beach. Wide-open spaces inspire, provoke, and calm. Human creations can have the same effect on space: music, ...

Reflect Some like to manipulate words in the Bible to make certain passages suit their personal desires. Slaveholders used to reference the story of Ham (Genesis 10:18–27) to justify slavery. The reality is that we must strive to take a ...

Reflect Our best self is compassion, because we are made in the image and likeness of a compassionate God. But how do we act from that finest self? Surely, it’s God’s gift. But it also relies on our spending time ...