God

Kyoto, Japan - Geisha Mamechiho by Ben Houdijk 4564085432_902eeb9327_o.jpg

Of Lost Keys, Japan and Vulnerabilities …

Our youngest daughter is leaving for a week-long enrichment trip to Japan with her schoolmates. Two teachers, a priest, and a female teacher are heading up the excursion.

It will be a first for the school that annually sends students abroad and around the world, as well as to local hideaways.

Our daughter is the only freshman

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Of Mothers, Daughters and Cracking Open the Pomegranate…

A fruit of both the body and the soul, the spirit and heart, the pomegranate casts a net long and wide, deep and with breadth stretching into those areas of life perceived not with the eyes but with inner knowing that comes with age and experience.

The relationship between mothers and daughters is as old as humankind and time.

What could Persephone have been thinking when

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Of Blessings, Christmas, and Du’a’s of Gratitude…

Today I read a guest post by Joy Kay, Holiday Relief in the Midst of Grief, at the blog Our Stories Gods Glory , describing the joy and challenge she is presently experiencing during this Holiday Season as the first since her mother died last spring.

As I read Kay’s moving essay it struck me how this is the first time in a long while that I am enjoying the Christmas Season.

In fact I have never experienced this type of peace and comfort as I am now.

As a child Christmastime brought a hustle and bustle, that though filled with excitement, I now, nearly 40 years later, realize

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Of Relationships, Dharma and That Mirror of Mirrors Which Sits At Our Core…

The decisive question for man is:
Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life.

In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.

In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.

–Carl Gustav Jung on Jung in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” by Carl Jung

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I recently heard a podcast, Relationship Revelation, given by Deborah and Lyle Dukes on Chocolate Pages hosted by Pam Perry.

During the interview Deborah Dukes addressed the importance of relationships and how our interactions reveal not only who we are at the core and the essence of our personality, but also how we interact with God.

“You will [discover] what is inside you… [whether] you [have the capacity to] love… when relating to others. …Your relationships with others mirror your relationship with God. The way we treat other people is an indicator, is a guide, [to the nature of] our relationship how with God. [God said,] ‘It is not good for [an individual] to be alone.'”

We need others.

Man cannot live on bread alone. Nor can woman.

Much of what Deborah and Lyle discuss forms the cornerstone of Deborah’s assertions in her book,

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Katherine Harms–writer aboard S/Y No Boundaries

When I first began writing, I wanted to write, because I wanted to have published something.

In 2000, I started writing, because I had something to say.

In 2000, during Lent I studied the life of Hannah, the mother of Samuel as a model for making sacrifices.

By the autumn, I was working on a novel about Hannah.

I had discovered that her faith journey in ancient Israel had many parallels with the faith journey of a woman in the twenty-first century, despite the three millennia that separated Hannah and me.

In 2004, my book, Hannah’s Journal, placed third in a field of 270 entries in the Christian Writers Guild First Novel Contest.

That book is still unpublished, but my success in the contest invigorated me.

I soon tackled two more novels, which are at present unfinished. The reason is that I continued to develop a better sense of direction as a writer.

In the beginning, I almost dismissed my non-fiction writing as busy work, something to do when I couldn’t think of any stories.

I wrote meditations, prayers, worship guides, articles and teaching plans.

While I struggled with the problems of plot, character development, setting, dialogue and so forth that are part of the craft of a fiction writer, I wrote commentary and background spontaneously, as a natural outgrowth of my research.

One day I had the mind-boggling revelation that it was possible to be a successful writer without selling a novel.

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African Bushmen, God, and Reality in Writing…

There is a Dream dreaming us.

–African Bushman

(The Mystic Vision–Daily Encounters with the Divine, Compiled by Andrew Harvey and Anne Baring)
How often do I create characters, work with them in uncovering their stories and personalities as I put write them on the page only to then meet a person who within seconds I recognize as one of my characters in a novel?

Very.

Of course these people have most often been around since long before I wrote or even conceived of the story to my novel, and its characters. I have not breathed them into life. And yet a connection exists between what we write and the life around us.

Let’s say for instance that the people I meet who remind me of characters I have created or who have emerged in my stories, have risen in some sense, from my novels.



What would that mean, that we as writers create characters whom we will then encounter in the physical form of human individuals through engagements and interactions and life?

And let’s say these people do not know, have no understanding or awareness that we are their creator.

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Of Identity, Persona and Naïveté…

Like Adam and Eve whom God warned not to eat of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, the protagonists of our stories often encounter box they are to leave closed, lovers whose lips theirs are not to touch, forests in which they are encouraged not to wander alone, galas and balls that on attending they must exit by the stroke of midnight, and alas sea witches with whom they should strike no bargains.

And yet our central characters push the envelope open creating a second upheaval.

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