Written On Our Hearts

He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; in Him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the Church; He is the beginning, the first-born of the dead, that in everything He might be pre-eminent  ~ Colossians 1:15-18 It was an early spring Friday afternoon, my little brother and I got off the school bus and walked the familiar two blocks home. As we approached our house we could hear the sound of chainsaws and soon noticed a crew of so-called “landscaping professionals” just about finishing the removal of our neighbor's apple tree. While the roots of this particular tree were definitively on our neighbor's property, the branches hung over a fence by our vegetable garden providing some shade and blocked the view to an ugl...

I’ve known since I was in first grade that my stay in purgatory will probably be quite long (and I believe my reservation at the Suffering Suites hotel is getting longer day by day, but never mind that for now). As I remember, the earliest series of serious and repeated offenses that sent me toward the temporal timeout corner was not doing my Monkey Business in first grade. Yes, you read that correctly, Monkey Business. You’d think that any first grader who successfully avoided monkey business would have a golden ticket to heaven, except that my first grade teacher Mrs. Gerwig cleverly used this deceptive term to mean classwork. And who has time for doing Monkey Business when one is already knee deep in…what is the term I am looking for…oh that’s it…monkey business. But no matter how one dressed up doing school work (even hanging a vine across the chalkboard with monkey’s swinging from it holding worksheets) I never liked it, let alone did much of it in first grade. Instead I was c...