I (and Abbie) just finished the audiobook No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, by Richard C. Schwartz.  How’s that for some light vacation road-trip earbud sharing?  Dr. Schwartz has been developing this model over the course of his professional life, now widely…

This is the final week of the summer softball season for Ila’s NCIL league that plays at Whetstone Park.  I’ve been co-coaching along with several other parents since early May.  We’ve lost more games than we’ve won, and the 9-11 age range makes for quite a developmental spread.  But this…

Last Sunday Joel made a very brief reference in his sermon to the recently released movie, Inside Out 2 as a way to illustrate that you could take in the second part of something (his two-part sermon) without the first, but you’d probably be missing out on some things. When…

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” We come into this world completely dependent on others to keep us alive.  When we reach adolescence, we learn a healthy independence from our caretakers.  When we grow up, we come to realize we have been interdependent all along. Dependence – Independence –…

Last Thursday through Saturday, five of us from CMC represented the congregation at the Central District Conference annual meeting.  Our biennial theme is “Listen! Wisdom is Calling.” I have long appreciated that the conference sees its congregations, in the words of a key document, as “something like a family of…