These past few months, I’ve been dealing with annoying rashes on my hairline, eyebrows and neck. They flare up often, triggered by almost anything — temperature changes, humidity, sweat, stress, etc. They’re usually red and sometimes itchy, and they had calmed down before I left for Kauai. But lo and behold, they got worse after a few days of arriving.

When people get off Interstate 90 at Division Street, they are greeted by the spire of Redemption Church at the corner on Second Avenue. Though the busy corner has been home to the church since it opened in 2014, rising crime in the neighborhood has led church leadership to list the church for sale so they can move to a different location.

The Russians drove my father’s family from Europe, not the Nazis. My paternal grandfather, living in the neverland between Ukraine and Russia, fled to America in the 1920s. Pogroms that decimated Jewish villages in Eastern Europe had been sending Jews west for decades, fueling bursts of Jewish immigration to the U.S.

In 1998, the monks at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, chose to bring in the new millennium by imagining the 2,000 year old (or more) words of Scripture in a way that would capture the zeitgeist of modern times without losing the concept of anno Domini. The result is The Saint John’s Bible, an illuminated bible reminiscent of the ancient texts that were transcribed across abbeys throughout Europe during the last millennium. Now that Bible is on display in Spokane.

“Satan” in the Baha’i writings symbolizes our inclination to turn from God. Satan’s persona is “a product of human minds and of instinctive human tendencies toward error,” according to ‘Abdu’l-Baha. Pride, ego, the “insistent self,” symbolized by Satan, represent baser human instincts.

As long as I can remember, something inside of me has nudged my heart to make a healthy difference in someone else’s life. Not so much in my own, but in someone else’s life. It’s no surprise, kids, that making some effort has always made a healthy difference in my own life. I am so proud of you three today because I see you all trying to make healthy differences in other people’s lives in what you are doing right now