Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Since 2007

Tag: peace

  • It’ll be stronger than it was before it broke

    A story of a pivotal moment in my relationship with my youngest son. A chance to teach character, a chance to show grace.

  • Forgiveness isn’t reconciliation

    After you forgive someone, must you reconcile? I think the answer is, sometimes, no.

  • The mechanics of forgiveness

    What I’ve learned through painful experience about how to forgive so that I can be at peace.

  • Meditations on forgiveness and reconciliation

    All week I’ll be sharing favorite posts about forgiveness.

  • Is being mindful of the present moment overrated?

    As I drove to work the other day, I dreamed of my future. I should have been paying closer attention to the road. When I got to work I realized I couldn’t remember anything about the drive. Oops! I have always been a guy who ruminates about the past and frets over the future. It sometimes takes over…

  • Meditative housework

    I’m anxious, driven. I am always thinking, worrying. Pausing for quiet is hard. I have to really concentrate to shut my brain off and find peace. That’s why I like to wash the dishes. It helps that I don’t have a dishwasher. I’ve thought about installing one so the house is easier to sell someday. But if the…

  • Up on the roof

    Autumn’s never been my style – give me the warmth of spring and summer instead. Even though the colorful trees are beautiful in my neighborhood, they are mature and plentiful. They dump a huge mess on my lawn every year at this time, and collecting their bounty consumes weekend after weekend. Fortunately, my lawn tractor makes…

  • Captured: Stigma, style, and stamens

    I buy cut flowers at the grocery store from time to time. I’m sure that the person who rings me up thinks I’m buying them for a girlfriend or a wife, but I’m currently unattached. I buy them for myself. The Japanese have raised flower arranging to an art form. I think of it every time…

  • Find joy where life is

    It’s Down the Road’s fifth blogiversary! All month I’m reposting favorite stories from the blog’s early days. It was my third annual trip to the Vida Nueva mission in Piedras Negras, Mexico. The day after I returned from my first mission trip to Mexico, my wife and I separated. By the second trip, she had filed…

  • Checking my barometer

    A large barometer used to hang on the wall in my grandparents’ palatial retirement estate. Grandpa tried to explain to me how it told him when storms were coming, important when you lived in the country in a day before 24-hour TV weather channels, but it went over my young head. But after I grew up my…

  • Everything you need

    Most of my life I thought I had to make myself right before I could approach God. I had to stop swearing, stop having sex with my girlfriend, stop lying to cover up things I didn’t want to admit, and stop eating entire large pizzas for comfort when I was feeling blue. I needed to…

  • Find joy where life is

    In the few months before I went on the mission trip to Mexico last fall I started a new job, my divorce became final, and I left a one-room apartment and rented a five-bedroom house. I grieved my marriage (and tried to be a good dad to my sons as they grieved the changes in…