Just outside my window, I can see a beautiful yellow rose. It wasn’t there last week, well actually it was, but it was just tightly bound up under its green calyx. A lot can happen in a week, in a day, in a moment. I can see the beauty but to deeply […]
A Wellness Path
683 posts
Around the hillside of the sheep farm where I was raised were grooves worn into the soil by hundreds of sheep following each other. It was the easiest route. I also have routes in my thinking patterns that have become ruts. Familiar paths that have been worn deep into my thinking. A thought gets […]
She walked into my office in a long, flowing skirt. She always had loved long, flowing skirts. But she blamed them and herself for both of her rapes. “Maybe if I hadn’t worn a skirt,” she thought. And she hated herself. The man read from his journal. Almost 20 pages […]
If you were to open my mother’s Bible, the first thing you would notice would be the handwritten notes and Bible verses for mental health that kept her secure in God. Dig a little further and you would come across underlined verses, cut-out sections from the church newsletter, and notes […]
It was election day here in New Zealand last Saturday and as I stood in line to cast my vote I started a conversation with an elderly English gentleman. He had come to New Zealand in 1968 on a world trip. Running out of money, he decided to stay. ‘Well, why […]
When I was on a 6-hour road trip back to university I picked up a hitchhiker. It was cold and wintery as I turned a corner on the Desert road and I saw a young man with his thumb stuck out. Thin, short hair and poorly clothed for the winter, […]
The shame of an attempt at suicide can cling onto you like the odor of some dirty old socks. You would do anything to get rid of that stench. Is that a good description of shame? That feeling of embarrassment at what you have done. You want to hide, run, […]
When God has left the building, turning up the volume won’t help. At the school where I grow vegetables, it can be very noisy. I have a group of children that love to help and to get my attention they will often speak louder, and wave hands like windmills. It can […]
Life has a tragic way of repeating itself. It seems at times that we just go round an endless loop of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Then someone says ‘forget what lies behind.’ One of my favorite classic movies is Groundhog day with a very young Bill […]
It’s always dangerous when we subconsciously create a ‘saviour’ out of a sinner. If you stand too close to the pedestal, of a venerated statue, you’ll get damaged by the cracks. I always cringed when someone would call me ‘Pastor Barry’. If possible I would always ask them to never do […]