Everybody needs somebody to talk to, so sometimes my daughter Meredith talks to her microwave.

When you’re young, you think you understand people. When I was 13, almost everyone I knew explained everyone else with a simple word like “insecure.” (Which was probably true, actually.) As we got older, we explained each other in slightly more complicated ways, drawn from the kind of psychology you pick up from Time magazine and intro to psych classes in college, often tracing whatever behavior we wanted to explain by the poor target’s childhood.

It’s a hard habit to break, but as you get older you begin to see that people are mysteries, even to themselves. You’d think that of all people St. Paul understood himself, ...

Word To Life, February 5

North Texas Staff

January 2012

February 5, Fith Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle B. Readings:

The topic of the health trials my family had experienced in the previous five years came up in a recent conversation with a friend, a West Coast Catholic editor. He said something to the effect that, “You must think God really has it in for you.”

With two brain surgeries for myself (successful) and breast cancer ...