Faith & Life Inspirational Message

There are a number of reasons I continue to read new and disparate things.   As I get older, I don’t want to become more boring!   That assumes some of my students now consider me to be boring.   I realize I do not get to decide whether someone thinks I am boring.   I could be the most exciting human being in my state, but if an eighteen-year old college student decides I am boring, then for them I am boring.   What I think does not matter for them.            I continue to read because I am curious.   I learned long ago that nurturing my curiosity makes me more interesting and more knowledgeable.   I have the best chance of being interesting if I am interested.   That goes for a number of things, but I am convinced it clearly is true for spirituality.   I like to have a wide range of interests.   Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, the old farm saying goes.   As one who grew u...

I have been teaching long enough to be able to guess when the students will not know a particular word that I might use.   For example, using the term, respite, in the title of this inspirational piece would be something many of the students in a typical classroom would not know.   And if they do not know the term, they would not use it.   Not knowing the term I understand.   Once upon a time, none of us had language.   All the words we know and use we had to learn.             What I don’t understand in so many students in my classroom is their lack of curiosity.   It strikes me as quite sad when folks still so young don’t seem curious.   Of course, they may be curious in other arenas in life.   But I suspect curiosity is a fairly broad trait.   If I am not curious in one area, I think it is likely my “curiosity quotient” is pretty low across the board.   I know part of my functi...

It is with considerable trepidation that I write about my granddaughter.   Certainly it is not that she embarrasses me.   To the contrary, I am very proud of her.   That is one of the roles of grandparents, as I have learned from others.   Of course, she is cute, smart, and about the most amazing young kid of this century!   And of course, that is totally biased and ungrounded, but that is my prejudice.             Actually writing about my grandkid is something like pulling out too many photos of her and subjecting a friend with more photos than the one picture he or she probably is willing to look at.   I know it takes longer to read this than it would take to look at one picture and say something like, “that’s nice!”             I have begun to realize that my granddaughter is becoming my teacher.   That is probably not surprising to C...

Even though I grew up on a farm in Indiana and spent a great deal of time outside, I would not say I am as attuned to nature as one might expect.   In some ways it is a little disappointing to realize this and admit it.   Of course when I was outside, I was surely aware of the weather.   If it is raining, you don’t need a very high IQ to know it is raining!   Awareness of the weather, however, does not mean you are generally aware of nature.             Every time I come back to Annie Dillard’s great book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , I am reminded of my off-and-on relationship with nature.   I realize again how much I miss on a walk across campus.   I lament at how unconscious I apparently am so much of the time.   At one level, this is sad because it means I am capable of so much more.   At another level, it is funny.   It is funny because I sometimes think I am fairly aware and, th...