On the Journey
By Rick Hamlin

April 2010

  • Married

    It was a brilliant April day, the air so fresh and fragrant you could drink it. I walked to the church from our apartment in my blue blazer, a new white shirt, the tie we’d bought for the event, my hands in my pocket and my feet a few inches off the ground. 

    Carol was already at the church in the dress she’d bought at a discount shop on Orchard Street, decorated with some old lace her mom found in a drawer. I shook the minister’s hand. “Do you have the rings?” he asked.

  • A Sweet Blessing

    We flew to San Francisco to visit William in his first place as an adult, the first place he’s lived that isn’t a dorm room.

    So maybe it’s not that glamorous, the top floor of an ramshackle Victorian house in a scruffy neighborhood with lots of street life. Five boys in a place with only one bathroom, but it feels like heaven to him. And it seemed like a bit of heaven to me. 

  • A Mental Workout

    At the gym this morning I kept thinking of a Bible verse. 

    As a lot of you know I always pray a psalm in the morning and I use an old battered pocket Bible that I’ve had for years. Keep it in my gym bag. The advantage of having an old Bible handy is that it has my scribbling and underlining in it. 

  • Happy Easter!

    Go ahead and say it, “Happy Easter!”

    There I was at the drugstore this morning getting some cookies and Band-Aids and as I looked at the clerk, a woman I’ve chatted with a dozen times before, I thought, “Maybe she doesn’t celebrate Easter so it probably wouldn’t be polite to wish her “Happy Easter!” 

Rick Hamlin is the executive editor of Guideposts magazine. His regular prayer habit is a psalm a day and some meditation on his commute to work, which happens to be a New York subway train.