On the Journey
By Rick Hamlin

July 2010

  • Summer's Answer to Prayer

    There’s a photo of summer pinned to the bulletin board in the kitchen that I stare at all year long. The beach chairs, the big tent we set out in front of the beach rental, the endless expanse of sand, a sliver of water and our noses in a book.

    By the end of the week I’ll be there!

  • Work & Prayer

    What do you wear to a vinegar festival? “A sour expression,” a friend of ours suggested.

    The festival was hosted by Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourette at Our Lady of The Resurrection Monastery in LaGrangeville, New York. Sounds like quite a mouthful, but the place looked a lot more down-home than that and the Benedictine Brother Victor was engaging and approachable, wearing a dungaree apron over his gray cassock. 

  • Pray for Rain

    Why does it always rain after you do the watering?

    Why does it never rain when you remember your umbrella?

    This is really going to be about prayer—I promise—but let me start with the weather. It was really hot last week. And it hadn’t rained in a long while. The grass in the park is looking pretty parched and the crabapple tree outside our kitchen window is losing its leaves. In July. And yet on Saturday, there was supposed to be this tremendous downpour.

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.