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Draw near: Praying about friendships and loneliness

Lynne Baab • Tuesday April 4 2023

Susan and Clair had very different experiences of friendship during the pandemic. For Susan, the loneliness of the pandemic left lasting challenges. For Clair, the pandemic was a time of relational overload that raised ongoing questions. [1]

Susan retired in early 2019. In those first months of retirement, she realized how much her relational cup had been filled by her work in a busy realty office. In her last years of work, she had also volunteered on Tuesdays at a community dinner at her church, attended church on Sundays and enjoyed chatting with folks afterwards, and often got together with various friends...

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Draw near: Praying to accept pain as a source of growth

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 28 2023

“No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.” —John Donne, “Meditation 17” of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

I resist John Donne’s idea with every particle of my being. I don’t want to be shaped by pain because I don’t want to experience pain! No, no, no! However, my perceptive and supportive husband tells me that my 16 years of battling depression (from age 27 to 43) softened me. I met Dave when I was 23, and he says he remembers many moments in my twenties when I came across as...

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Draw near: Praying for the ability to listen to unexpected voices

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 21 2023

My mother has a green thumb, and her home and garden are full of thriving plants. When she shows me a new plant, she’ll often say, “This plant is happy here,” meaning that the plant is thriving in the western sunlight of this particular window or the more diffuse light in the living room. Her plants tell her where they like to be.

I’ve read about sculptors who say that the stone tells them what it wants to be. In an article about her spring quilt, Avis Collins Robinson said, "I let the fabric’s colors and textures tell me how they want...

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Draw near: Asking God for maps

Lynne Baab • Tuesday March 14 2023

Until I was nine years old, my dad was a pilot in the U. S. air force. For those of you who love planes, he flew P-37s and P-51s in World War 2, then cargo planes (C-47s and C-54s, also known as DC3s and DC6s) in the late 1940s and 1950s. I have vivid memories of my dad coming home from a trip. He would carefully spread out maps on the dining room table and show me where he’d been. One time, he had flown somewhere tropical – the Caribbean? Hawaii? – and he saw a black sand beach. He showed...

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