From The Deacon's Bench

  I don’t know about you, but as we begin a “new” year, I often look back in history to see what was happening not only during the most recent “last year” but also decades ago.   There is one thing that I have learned from this exercise…we humans seem to continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. It’s one thing to make one kind of mistake, learn from it and not repeat that mistake, but it is entirely different when we make the same exact mistake over and over again. When God created us, he afforded us “free will”, which is a wonderful gift, and I can’t imagine what our lives would be like without it.    However, I think that we are often seeing demonstrated lately is “free will” without any thought as to what the consequences of the act may be. As children, we all made mistakes.   When our parents became aware of those mistakes, often, they would use it as a “teaching moment”.   Depending on the exact situation, that “teaching” could be a calm explanation a

  For some time now, I have been receiving a daily meditation e-mail from the Henri Nouwen Society.  I find that these meditations usually help me get started on the right path for the day.  I will admit that I don't always stay on that path, but I'm getting better. I'm going to share the following recent meditation that really "spoke" to me.                                                   Fools for Christ Sometimes we have to dare to be fools for Christ. That means that sometimes we have to be willing to give food to people who don’t really need or deserve it. And sometimes we have to be willing to work with some people who might even exploit us. Maybe this is as close as we can come to an experience of self-emptying. It is the experience of being useless in the presence of the Lord. Understand me well, I am not trying to praise impracticality, nor am I trying to suggest that you should not stop doing the things you are doing when they prove to be counterproduc