June 2022

Having been a church musician and songwriter since the age of 18, I have been blessed to attend many liturgical and music conventions. These have been located throughout the U.S. and are usually held during the summer. Twice, conferences were held in Milwaukee. The Sisters of St. Agnes, who have graced the Ellis County area with their ministry long before I was a child, have their mother house in Wisconsin. The sisters I knew in Hays always spoke so fondly of the mother house. The faith and dedication to ministry displayed by the sisters made me want to visit there.

Even before I went there the first time, it was described to me simply as a “thin spot,” a place where the distance between heaven and earth was thinner than elsewhere, a place where the presence of God seems more palpable, almost heavier. It was not until I visited that I understood what others were trying to describe to me.

A few years ago, I traveled to Japan to spend five weeks training as a live-in student in the martial art of Aikido. This was a very intense training time. On long days we got up before 5 a.m. to start a cycle of arriving at one of several dojo (martial arts training halls) nearby to clean the dojo one hour before class, practice for a one-hour class, serve tea, clean, and then move on to the next place to repeat the process. The long days had six classes, so we tended to get to bed around midnight before repeating the cycle the next day. On shorter days we would have only a few classes and could even sometimes rest or travel nearby. We also had certain holidays when we'd travel into the mountains or to nearby parks or universities to demonstrate, train, or simply rest and celebrate.