A Sunday Morning Letter
Welcome
We often think the most important moments of our lives are the dramatic ones—the beginnings and the endings, the celebrations and the farewells. Yet most of life is lived somewhere in between.
The Church calls this season Ordinary Time, the long green season. Green is the color of growing things. It reminds us that while the great celebrations of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost shape our faith, it is the ordinary days that form it.
This summer finds me in an Ordinary Time of my own. One season of ministry has ended, another is waiting just over the horizon, and for seven Sundays I find myself standing somewhere in between. Rather than rushing through this threshold, I’ve decided to linger for a while.
If you’ll allow me, I’d like to invite you to join me each Sunday morning.
Bring your second cup of coffee.
We’ll spend a little time together before the week begins.
The coffee is still hot as I write these words, and the house has not yet awakened.
This quiet hour has become one of the great gifts of my day. Before the conversations begin, before the headlines compete for my attention, before the responsibilities of family and ministry fill the hours ahead, there is a simple rhythm that grounds me: coffee, prayer, Scripture, silence… and only then, writing.
I hope you’ll forgive me if I imagine you sitting across the table this morning. Perhaps your coffee is still warm as well. Maybe you’re still in your pajamas. Perhaps your house is already full of life, or wonderfully quiet because the children who once filled it have grown and gone. Whatever your Sunday morning looks like, I’m grateful you’ve chosen to spend a few moments here before the week begins.
The room where I write is my favorite room in our old New England home. It isn’t fancy. It was never meant to be. It’s simply the dining room—the room where ordinary life unfolds around an ordinary table.
I have come to believe that dining room tables are among the holiest places in a home.
Homework is done there. Bills are paid there. Birthday candles are blown out there. Some of life’s hardest conversations happen there, along with some of its greatest laughter. Meals are shared. Prayers are whispered. Tears are quietly wiped away after everyone else has gone to bed. Love, in all its ordinary forms, keeps returning to the table.
Perhaps that is why Jesus was so often found around one.
As I stood to refill my coffee this morning, the old pine floorboards reminded me that they have stories of their own to tell.
They creaked beneath my feet.
They always do.
No two boards seem to agree on which direction they ought to go. They rise and dip in unexpected places, shaped by centuries of New England winters and the footsteps of generations who crossed them long before I arrived. Even now, they occasionally catch me by surprise. Sometimes I still lose my balance.
It occurred to me this morning that perhaps faith is like that.
We live in a world that prefers everything smooth and level. We admire polished surfaces and straight lines. We imagine that maturity means having everything figured out.
But old houses know better.
These floorboards are not imperfect because they have failed.
They are uneven because they have faithfully carried life.
This weekend our nation has been celebrating its own beginnings. Flags have waved from front porches. Fireworks have lit the summer sky. Families have gathered around picnic tables and backyard grills to remember where we have come from.
I have always believed that gratitude is one of the Christian virtues. It is good to remember. It is good to give thanks.
Yet every honest remembrance is also humble enough to admit that there is still work to do.
The old floor beneath my feet reminds me of that.
It bears the marks of those who came before me. Some of those marks are beautiful. Others tell harder stories. But I would never sand them away, because they are part of the truth of this house.
Perhaps nations are like that.
Perhaps churches are like that.
Perhaps souls are like that too.
We give thanks for how far we have come while acknowledging there is still work to do.
Maybe that is one of the gifts of Ordinary Time.
Gardens are not planted and harvested on the same day.
Children do not become adults overnight.
Love deepens quietly.
Faith grows slowly.
The Church, in her wisdom, dresses herself in green during these long summer weeks because green reminds us that God’s favorite work often happens beneath the surface, long before anyone notices.
That thought stayed with me as I opened this Sunday’s Gospel. Jesus sends seventy-two disciples into places they have never seen before. He does not promise them certainty. He does not hand them a map. He simply tells them to go, trusting that God has already gone ahead of them.
There is something deeply comforting about that.
Most of us are standing at some kind of threshold.
A new beginning.
A painful ending.
A difficult decision.
A season we never expected.
We would much prefer a level floor.
Instead, God often gives us the grace to keep walking.
One faithful step at a time.
Before I finish this morning, I want to tell you one more thing about this room.
Visitors often notice the old fireplace and ask if it still works.
For years I answered without thinking.
‘No,’ I’d say. ‘It doesn’t.’
But I realized recently that I had been wrong.
The fireplace no longer burns wood, but it has never stopped warming the room.
The mantle above it has become a gallery for our daughter’s artwork. Bright colors and childhood imagination now rest on timbers that have witnessed centuries of New England life. Every new masterpiece gently replaces the one before it—not because the old drawing wasn’t loved, but because there is always room for the next creation.
Sometimes I sit with my coffee, look up at those pictures, and smile at the thought that a house old enough to remember another world now proudly displays the artwork of a little girl just beginning to discover this one.
Perhaps that is what hope looks like.
The old making room for the new.
Tradition making room for imagination.
Love making room for another generation.
Maybe that is what God has been doing all along.
Thank you for sharing your second cup of coffee with me this morning.
This week, I hope you’ll notice one ordinary thing you’ve walked past a hundred times before. A kitchen table. A favorite chair. The worn handle of an old door. The creak of a floor beneath your feet.
You may discover that it has been telling you a story all along.
Until next Sunday, companion, keep noticing.
I’ll be here.
The coffee will be ready.
