Authors /
Guy Sayles
Guy Sayles is a coach, spiritual director, consultant, and writer based in Asheville, North Carolina.
The church is disappearing from the middle
Religious identity in the US now follows partisan affiliation, says demographer Ryan Burge. But congregations could still be places where that sorting gets undone.
Life’s persistent questions
I don’t want to reach the end of life having complied with external demands instead of listening to the internal, eternal voice.
Creating quiet
Noise and nausea share etymological roots.
Wilderness life
In my three-year sojourn with cancer, I’ve faced fears, limits, and questions of who I am now that I can't be a pastor in the ways I once was.
The news that matters
While the Romans were broadcasting fake news about the emperor as savior, God was at work elsewhere.
Name-calling and Ivory soap
God has “crowned human beings with glory and honor.” This is important to hear amid the demeaning rhetoric of these disheartening days.
Escape ordinary?
Two intriguing entertainment venues have recently opened in downtown Asheville, North Carolina: Conundrum and Breakout. They use virtual reality and other technologies to create adventures of escape, journeys from lost to found, and mysteries to explore.
Participants assume new identities as hostages, questers, secret agents, or detectives.
Human community, human Jesus
“Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Like most children raised by Christian parents in the South, I learned that song before I learned to sing my ABCs.
Young black men are dying, and fear keeps us from love
Recent news, as so often is the case, has brought images and descriptions of young black men shot by police officers. The narrative is sickeningly familiar: a young person dies; protests take place; authorities promise a full and fair investigation and, if warranted, consequences for the officers involved; journalists and community leaders remind us of the long series of these deaths; voices call for mutual respect and genuine collaboration between minority communities and law enforcement agencies, and insist on reform of the justice system.
Hardly anything changes.
Teach us to care and not to care
Like many cities, Asheville, North Carolina, has a “Before I Die . . .” wall—a large chalkboard with multiple spaces for people to write some of their hopes for the future. Since the wall is on the path I take for most of my downtown walks, I read them several days each week. I’ve laughed and wept, said “me too” or “not me,” and wondered how many of the hopes chalked on that wall will be realized.
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Creation groans and so do we
Over the last few months, I’ve often traveled north on I-26/US 23 into the broken heart of eastern Kentucky’s coal country.
The land looks weary.
We can trust in surprises
I enjoy Christmas—always have. I look forward to children’s pageants, complete with Burger King crowns for wise men, bath-robed shepherds, and aluminum foil-wings for angels; misty-eyed singing of “Silent Night” in the glow of candlelight; watching George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge and Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, the Grinch’s stealing and returning Christmas yet again. I look forward to the arrhythmic ringing of Salvation Army bells.
Hope unlimited by our limits
Hope is sinewy, tenacious, and determined. It gives us strength when ours is gone, carries us into the future when we’ve been knocked-off our feet by the disappointments of the present, and makes it possible for us to trust that God is with us even when we feel alone.
We can’t produce hope for ourselves.
Deep convictions, strong opinions, and tender love
There’s more than a year to go before the presidential election, and, already, I am weary of the campaign. When I can manage simply to view the candidates as performers, some talented and others not so much, and hear their speeches as scripts in an over-the-top television series, the political news is entertaining.
Hey, look at me
My friend Bob and I were sitting on the bleachers just outside the racquetball court and trying to catch our breath between games. A group of race-running, soccer-ball kicking, tricycle-riding, and twirling-dancing preschool children spread out across the basketball court set the air abuzz with an energy I envy and filled the gym with squeals and laughter.
Several brave and curious children came near us and looked at us as if we were bears in a zoo.
The open wound and the dream of beloved community
I grew up in metropolitan Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s. (I graduated from a high school in south Fulton County in 1975.) Atlanta was, of course, the hometown of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So, when I was in elementary school, news about his work, about the hopes it inspired, and about the controversies it generated was “local news.” I often heard snippets of his sermons and speeches on television; they lodged in my mind and heart alongside the songs we sang in Sunday School