Wednesday, May 13, 2026
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Ruah
Paul stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.
Aquinas/Aristotle: To love God is something greater than to know him …
Lots of stuff happening in my life; how about yours? I would love to hear your snippets and stories … and now for a little puzzle: Who is this guy?
Here are links to 10 devotions from 2018 to 2025 … they have one author/book/quotation in common:
2018 Kentucky love affair
2019 No, not one
2020 The Altogether Given
2020 Life together
2021 Working slowly back to the land of the living
2023 Living right on
2023 Living (and dying) for the light
2024 Given
2025 Body work
The author mentioned in each of these devotions doesn’t own a computer, writes on a typewriter and offers straightforward explanations for why, has mostly used horses to do the farmwork northeast of Louisville, and often captivates folks who come for an interview and didn’t expect to be captivated.
I have loved this person, born in 1934 and still kickin’ – this author, activist and farmer – for decades. My clever IT (not this IT) genius Stacey, who created the website which I hope, serves us all well, sat me down decades ago in his family’s Champaign backyard and introduced me to the author of The Unsettling of America, along with collections of “sabbath” poetry and dozens of “stories and novels of place.” A couple of years ago I listened to The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. I didn’t know it exactly, but my spirit’s eyes were dimming. I needed a different prescription for patriotism, prisms, trifocals, something. The book helped. RUAH. Holy Spirit Wind.
(Did I say I mostly can’t help putting people on a pedestal? And that more often I write like William Faulkner, not Ernest Hemingway?)
And that I’m not at good at keeping a secret? I’m sure you know by now if you didn’t immediately, who the author is.
So! Thank you, Stacey, for that introduction, and … editing my writing, being quiet most of the time, working in the middle of the night, and inviting the world to join you as another vagrant aristocrat. Thanks for reading audiobooks, for your music that throbs in San Antonio bars most weekends. Thanks for sharing your family with the Sandels.
And thanks too, for suggesting a beautiful typeface – “Book Antiqua” to fill the pages of nine and counting volumes of finding our way.
And thanks for inviting me to take time, to wait on my own “unsettling.” Lord, let me fall at just the right time through the mirrors, into wonderland, holding on to Alice’s hand.
I think that’s a pretty good way to describe my quadruple bypass surgery, which has now been scheduled for June 9th at 7 am., in the hospital where Margaret spent weeks and weeks five years ago. The people who cared so much about her, are now getting a chance to bless our family one more time.
Tonight we’re planning how to spend weekend time with Miles and Jasper and Finn … May 3 was Aly’s 14th birthday. Jack’s prom was the night before. And … in a couple of weeks, we’re headed with our whole family to Port Aransas on the Gulf of Mexico coast. Not since 2015 have we all been together like that, pushing the sand around with our toes. Thank you, Jesus.
Sitting on the windowsill, our cardiac surgeon looked at the cover of the book, the story of Margaret’s “commando” procedure five years ago, and smiled. You can’t hear his smile, but you can listen to him weigh with us our choices that day, if you want.
Preview attachment Dr Josh Grimm.m4aPreview attachment Dr Josh Grimm.m4a
There is that verse in Psalm 46. The one that ends with …. …BE.
(Acts 17-18, Psalm 148, John 14, John 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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