The Autumn leaves and winds are already beginning to blow!! Generally it is recognized that the beginning of September is the Meteorological Autumn. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, September is the beginning of the ecclesiastical year! For most of us this time is the...
Midsommer greetings to all! I trust that everyone has been enjoying their time off from the weekly church responsibilities of the necessary choir rehearsals and significant time spent with the weekly practice on the organ. I also hope that many of you were able to...
Dear Friends A passenger with “no idea” how to fly, safely landed a single-engine aircraft after its pilot lost consciousness. An air traffic controller (who also happens to be a certified flight instructor) answered the passenger’s distress call and guided his new...
Dear Friends, Colin Powell stated that, “There are no secrets to success. It’s the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.” The hard work and preparation are a given, but his statement begs an earlier question: What is success? What are we...
Dear Friends, In Harvard Business School professor Arthur Brooks’ new book, From Strength to Strength, he suggests that we need three things to be happy: faith, friends and meaningful work. In light of that, I couldn’t help notice what Ukraine’s President Zelensky...
Dear Friends, In my lifetime, I’ve been told to worry about: overpopulation, nuclear war, acid rain, holes in the ozone, an impending food shortage, an impending water shortage, an upcoming ice age, nuclear waste, soil erosion, the death of bumblebees, the collapse of...
Dear Friends, I hope you are surviving the normal challenges of this season, combined with the left turns of Omicron. I also hope that you are filled with hope. I highlight “hope” because I suspect that more than a few of you are fighting the fatigue of this pandemic,...
Dear Friends, My daughter face timed me last week and the first thing I noticed was the Christmas tree. Just so you don’t feel behind (or offended that she broke an unwritten rule of ‘no Christmas before Thanksgiving’), all the decorations were not complete. She...
Dear Friends, I know it is a bit early to think about Thanksgiving, but it is November now, and a great time to not only consider travel plans and culinary recipes, but to take a moment to initiate the ritual of giving thanks. Long before scientists devised...
Dear Friends, In this month’s Overtones, you will find pictures throughout the articles. To me, this speaks to a narrative of one of our chapter’s high values - intentional relationships. Though the pandemic has naturally changed some of the ways we have...
Dear Friends, Perhaps as I did, you expected warm and sunny days ushering in the month of July. Instead, it wasn’t just wind blowing through Chicago recently, but flash floods joined the tornado warnings and severe thunderstorms. Unless you were cleaning...
Dear Friends, I have long been a fan of the late USC philosophy professor, Dallas Willard. His insights were profound and his demeanor disarming and engaging. Few insights seem as prescient as his argument that we must “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our...
Dear Friends, The AGO Committee on Membership Development was recently tasked with the project of creating a webinar to be used as a resource for local chapters such as ours. Titled “Re-igniting, Re-imagining and Re-emerging from COVID-19,” eleven AGO chapters from...
Dear Friends, Suez Canal Last week, a sandstorm caused the cargo ship Ever Given to run aground in the Suez Canal, blocking it completely. The canal sees 10% of the world’s daily shipping traffic, but is only 300 feet wide in places. Ever Given is ¼ mile long,...
Scottish poet Robert Burns, ploughing his field, accidentally destroyed the nest that a mouse had carefully prepared in anticipation of winter. Reflecting, Burns left us the well-known phrase “best-laid plans”: You saw the fields laid bare and empty, and weary winter...
Dear Friends, This pandemic has made me more aware than ever before that I have little control over the most important things in life. I can’t keep my loved ones safe. I’m not in charge of the world. So, I’m learning to surrender to this lack of control and find...
Dear Friends, It has been said that an optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in, while a pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. If you were beat up by 2020, I can understand if you and those around you are anxious to see it go. I love a...
Recently someone asked me the question, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?” That question gave me pause, as it seems a bit of a challenge to embrace new experiences within the limitations of our world today. The ideas that come to my mind...
Dear Friends, A new genre of humor is emerging: jokes about 2020. I recently heard someone say they were not turning their clocks back “because no one wants an extra hour of this year.” I am not surprised that people want 2020 to be over. But, I do wonder why they...
Dear Friends, These days, I’ve been thinking about things I need to spend more time considering. Thomas Hobbes famously suggested that life is “poor, nasty brutish and short.” One might assume he is speaking from the context we find ourselves in today. Yet, most of us...
Dear Friends, It’s an Ice Age: Back when the Coronavirus was a news story from China, we had some warning from pundits that it was heading this way. As more and more cases occurred in the United States, it started to seem the only real question was whether it would...
Dear Friends, Summer is officially here! It’s time to fire up those grills, fill up the coolers and get ready to engage in all those summer activities we have been looking forward to over the recent months. Well, not exactly….I think we would all agree it has...
Dear Friends, Having watched Michael Jordan’s “The Last Dance” series a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but compare it to the situation facing many of us as musicians serving in a church setting. Is it possible we shared our “last dance” when we were...
Dear Friends, If you are like me, you don’t want to hear one more thing about the present situation with the coronavirus. It seems to be part of most conversations, and of course, naturally so. Though, I do love the fact that the world has come to our doorstep in the...