These are reflections written along the way — notes set down by someone who has spent a long life on the Christian road and is still learning what it means to walk it.
I did not set out to write a system or a study. I set out to pay attention. And I have found that if you watch long enough — a room, a road, a familiar passage of Scripture, a grief that will not lift — things begin to appear that are easy to miss in the movement and the noise. These pages are my attempt to hold what I have seen up to the light, and to ask what it might mean.
You will find several kinds of writing gathered here.
Some are allegories. I have imagined a place I call the Great Hall — a vast and ancient building where the people of God gather, where light falls through high windows and voices rise in song, and where, if you watch from the edges, you begin to notice the ones who are welcomed and the ones who are passed by. These are not reports, and they are not verdicts. They are glimpses, and I confess I do not always know what they mean. But I have come to trust that a truth allowed to arrive sideways often goes deeper than one announced head-on.
Some were written out of the hardest season of my life. My wife, Carol, died on the 22nd of December, 2025, after sixty years of marriage. The reflections that grew out of her death — shaped by Henri Nouwen’s In Memoriam — are less about mourning her than about paying attention to what her death is still doing in me. I have left them here in case they are of use to anyone walking a similar road.
And some — the ones I am beginning to add now — turn directly to Scripture, and they come in two kinds. Some dwell on a single word: the great words of the faith — love, communion, fellowship, forgiveness, and many more to come. I have found that these are not exhausted by being defined; they are meant to be lived in, turned over slowly, prayed. Others follow a passage — sometimes a single verse, sometimes a cluster of verses that belong together and form a teaching — and try simply to listen to what it is saying, and what it asks of us. In both, the aim is the same: not to master the text but to sit beneath it, one word or one passage at a time, and see what the Spirit shows.
What holds all of it together, I think, is one conviction I have been slow to learn and am only now beginning to trust: that the heart of everything is the love of Abba Father — not a doctrine to be admired but a place to live, the ground under everything and the safe place in every sorrow.
I do not write as one who has arrived. I write as a fellow traveler, from the shadows just inside the door, still asking the questions the road keeps asking me.
I am glad you have come this far. Take up your walking stick and walk with me a while.