I have a confession to make. I like to play cards. Not really. Iʼm not a card shark or anything like that. I donʼt know the first thing about playing bridge or poker. But I like to play solitaire. It's simple, quick, and efficient. I can sit down at the kitchen table and play two or three games in a matter of ten minutes, and I find it very relaxing.

I often stop in the midst of my work at the computer or reading a book and pick up a well-worn deck of cards and start laying them out on the table. The thing I really like about solitaire is watching how the cards run. If you play often enough, you begin to see patterns in the way they turn up.

For a while, they seem to play themselves, they turn up so well. You win one game, two, three, four, even five or six. Then they start turning up poorly, so that the game becomes turgid and doesn't seem to work at all. That goes on for one game, two, three, and so on. Finally the luck turns and goes the other way again. Every time I play, I see this, and I think, “This is the way life itself is.

As I was sitting down to compose this blog, some workmen in our building began a cacophony of drilling and hammering. Itʼs probably several floors away, but it sounds as if itʼs just on the other side of the wall.

Iʼm reminded of that passage in the Old Testament where Elijah the prophet was hiding in a cave, waiting for God's direction about what he should do. There was a windstorm—one of those big, crashing jobs that topple trees and reshape the landscape—and a rolling, bucking earthquake, and finally a great, raging fire, a real inferno; and the Bible says Godʼs voice wasnʼt in any of them.

It finally came instead as “a still, small voice,” or, as the Revised Standard Version says, “a sound of sheer silence.”

What are the pictures hanging on the wall of your memory? An old farm house where you grew up, with purple clematis climbing a trellis on the side of the porch? A little child you loved more than life itself clambering onto a school bus for her first day at school? A path in the woods where bluebells and columbines lay like a carpet on every side? A favorite teacher standing at the board with a pointer in his hand? Life is a long, long hallway filled with such pictures, isn't it? The longer weʼve lived, the longer the hallway and the more pictures.

I've always liked the Chinese saying that it's important to make new memories. It is. When we stop making memories, we might as well go to sleep and not wake up, because life is essentially over. So why do we become content to live in the past, merely reviewing the pictures we already have and not trying to make new ones?

LAO TZE, the ancient Chinese philosopher, once told about a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awakened, he didnʼt know if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

Have you ever been at a place in your life where you werenʼt sure about what is real and what is only illusion? If you say no, you probably arenʼt very observant, because most of us arrive at such a place many times in our lives. It's like a spot to which we keep returning when our normal anchors to social reality, such as love and faith and friendship, arenʼt holding very well. For some of us, it's what Yogi Berra once called “déja vu all over again.”

Do you remember that old line we used to say, "Fools' names and fools' faces are always seen in public places?" I can't remember why we said it. Maybe in response to seeing our friends' names or faces in the newspaper or their names linked together romantically, as in "Jimmy Loves Sally."

It could really apply today, couldn't it , to Youtube and Facebook and Myspace and even to a blog like this, that you can reach by punching on one of the ministers' portraits. There is something a little foolish, when you think about it, in a public display of one's name and picture like this. Who are we to be dispensing wisdom or sharing our thoughts in public?