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Holy Spirit disruptions: Pride and ego

Lynne Baab • Wednesday June 16 2021

Being a writer/teacher/preacher has created a form of pride or ego in me that the Holy Spirit has been disrupting pretty intensely during the pandemic. You might think the biggest form of pride or ego for writers/teachers/preachers would be the conviction that we are right. That has certainly been an issue for me for much of my life, something that my family members have mentioned dozens or even hundreds of times. It feels like I’ve learned a lot about that. Maybe I will have more to learn at another time, but that hasn’t been the pandemic pride/ego issue.

The form of pride...

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Quotations I love: Disenfranchised grief

Lynne Baab • Thursday April 1 2021

Last week I had a delightful conversation with a retired minister. We talked about patterns of aging, and she mentioned something she has observed. As people get older, they experience fear and anxiety about what’s happening to them. Then they default into the patterns that have helped them cope with anxiety in the past. She sees increased attempts to control as a primary coping strategy. I also see denial, forced optimism, alcohol, etc.

As she was talking, I remembered an article I recently read about disenfranchised grief, forms of grief that aren’t validated by the people around us or that we don’t...

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Quotations I love: P. D. James on pain and love

Lynne Baab • Tuesday February 23 2021

“The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world, but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have.” —P. D. James (1920-2014)

These are the last four sentences of P. D. James’s last book, The Private Patient, published in 2008. The setting...

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Reflections on six months of sheltering in place

Lynne Baab • Wednesday September 2 2020

On March 2, an epidemiologist friend contacted my husband Dave and me to say that we needed to start staying at home because of this new virus and Dave’s chronic lung disease. I spent a three days out and about doing a few last things, so the exact six month anniversary varies between Dave and me.

I stayed home almost completely for 4 months except for bicycle rides. In the past two months, since masks have been required in Washington State, I’ve been to the grocery store about six times and the big-box home improvement store about four times. We’ve sat outside...

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