Breadcrumbs

Friends-I am sitting at our kitchen table in the house in Niles. Ross is at school and Fran is away at a retreat so I'm alone with the dogs and cat. Looking out of the window, I'm presented with a beautiful snowy day and I can watch the birds in their winter skirmish for food while my neighbor, Lou, works to shovel the path around his house. I'm doing all of this from a nice warm house with a well stocked refrigerator and no fears that I'm going to lose all this tomorrow. This is a place of abundance that most of us inhabit. A lot of us have not had to worry about making ends meet or where we were going to get food. Unfortunately, this is not the case for a lot of people in DeKalb County. There is a number of people who struggle to get by financially every day. In our county there is a poverty rate of between 9 and 13% with a rate of food insecurity (people who don't know where their next meal is coming from) estimated at 12%. There is not a lot of data about work

My friend Brenda always talks about being on the beam or off the beam. This phrase brings to my mind lasers or beams of light, but it really refers to a path. Brenda talks about being on the beam when she makes good decisions and senses that she is following some sort of guide. She's off the beam when life is messy and she does those things she knows are not good or healthy.  Keeping our balance is hard. Some days it seems like so much effort to even get up on the beam to start. Other days I just can't keep balanced at all no matter what I do. The truth of the matter is that life can be hard, terribly hard, and staying on any sort of beam is the last thing on our mind. This is what makes our faith a challenge. I was just reading how in our modern frame we conceptualize ourselves as "thinking our way into right living". Centuries ago it was the opposite. In the ancient church one "lived into right thinking", you worked at staying on the beam and changin