Praytell

Welcome to Praytell.

I invite you to share with me the Geography of Healing. Together we will find what’s on the other side of the mountain and what’s over there at the far side of the plains.  It is, of course, the story of our lives.  In one way or another we are all healing, all travelling, and all moving to the “other side.”

Every journey needs a starting point, a guide, provisions and some sense of direction. Praytell is designed to provide all three. Here are the basics. This site will have posts that follow several different roads, each of which leads to life. These roads are:

Grace Notes — These daily reflections share my thoughts, questions, and musings that cross my mind.  For years, I sent our four now-grown children a daily Lenten reflection which they in turn shared with their friends.  Grace Notes continues these daily reflections. Each day’s entry is about life and the Geography of Healing.  Sometimes faith is the specific focus, sometimes events bring me to words.  Each day I hope that what is entered here will be meaningful for you, that it will prompt your own reflections.

Life’s Lectionary – I am a pastor. With Gary Gunderson, the Sr. VP of Mission at Methodist Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, I wrote the Leading Causes of Life. LCL presents an approach that helps us unpack the life-giving message in each week’s texts. The LCL approach to exegesis invites us all to take a deeper look and to find life in the sacred story. Each Tuesday I post the next week’s study. I am grateful for scholarly commentaries and the gifts of insight that perhaps only a seminary can provide.  But these studies ask for a different kind of discipline–they ask us to be attuned to the language of life itself, and to listen with an open heart to the word scripture has for us.  I invite your responses to these musings.

A Faith Health Conversation. It is easy to say there is a faith/health connection. But uncovering its full depth, its many paradoxes, its challenges and its blessings is a life-based task. I know something about disability, having lived 53 years as a Type One diabetic; survived two heart attacks and two strokes. The disabilities of my wife, Connie, and our children, are an inescapable part of their lives too. And so this faith/health conversation is no incidental matter. It is the stuff of life. These essays are my offerings, born of both study and experience. It is my hope that I can engage in conversation with you.

The Art of Healing  – Paintings. Several years ago, at the urging of my now 90 year-old mother, and following the strokes that took me from the town, people and church that I loved, I began painting. Martin Shaupenhaur saw life as a brutal experience. Art provided the only bridge to the divine. In these paintings, these shadows, these sunlit hills, I find a world of healing. It is in art that we regroup, start again, and give thanks to God for the incredible beauty of creation that transcends circumstance.

The Art of Healing - In Words. These occasional essays reflect on the role of art in creating a new world. I take what I have learned through art and put it into words. My hope is that they too may be a guide for us as we heal.  In painting we find that light has shapes, that we must not work a painting to death, but to bring it to life.  Painting is both confession and expression, essence and detail, full of edges both lost and found, and the mystery of color that is as elusive and compelling as our own world of emotion, thought, and prayer.

The Art of Healing - Poetry. Sometimes a sight says, “Paint me.” And sometimes words give themselves, and say, “Write us.” There is no particular theme to these poems, save to say they are about life. Some have been published, others are new.

Feedback You will find a feedback tab by each entry - feel free to join the conversation. And so . . . wish a debt of gratitude to Andy Pray who first visualized what we might do, and a warm word of welcome to you . . .

Let’s begin.