My lovely cousin Scott recently visited the grave of my great-great-great-grandfather, the last of my Drysdale ancestors to be buried in Scotland, before his widow and children emigrated to New Zealand in the 19th century. A cousin of my Dad’s had done the sleuthing to find the unmarked grave in the 1970s and wrote […]
On this last day of the Christmas season we are remembering that there was a great deal of suffering surrounding Christ’s birth. Mary was socially isolated to the point of giving birth while basically homeless. Joseph was charged with the responsibility of protecting a baby with a price on his head. And hundreds of children […]
Sure, most adults eventually marry or enter long-term partnerships, but even more adults in the West spend a considerable period of life as a single person. Actually, I’m just guessing about that, but it’s probably right. I read that nine out of ten American women will be widowed, given statistical life expectancy. Even among Christians, […]
Almost all of us will spend some of our adult lives single, but when we do we’ll be in a sometimes uncomfortable minority. There are some brilliant things about the single life and some challenges we need to help each other in to build deep and strong community for all of us. Following on from this […]
Remember Susan Cain? You may have seen her fabulous TED talk that I posted a week or two ago, based on her book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts. The guru on introverts in an extraverted world, she gives ten tips for parenting introverts on her website. For me (an extravert pretending to be an introvert at […]
Nicholas said to me in 2005, using his sharply-tuned crap-o-meter, that saying ‘I don’t have time for that’ is, consciously or otherwise, code for ‘I don’t want to do it.’ I’ve been hyperaware of the phrase ever since. I think I’d just told him I didn’t have time for getting back into yoga. Oops. Clearly, […]
I was single before I was married. That’s less obvious than it sounds, given the number of people who marry their high school sweethearts or have a number of relationships throughout their twenties and maybe thirties. I did neither. After a flurry of boyfriends in my teens (the internet won’t tell me the real […]
I’ve thought, written and preached a lot about hospitality over the past few years. But I’ve never accepted as much of it from other people as I have in the last ten months. Here is the first part of a set of reflections on just the overnight hospitality people have extended to me and my […]