Shannon Costello

Our last small group study was about peace, then the sermon was from Matthew 20, about the vineyard workers that expected to be paid more because they worked all day.  We are all like those angry workers, the pastor said, all indignant because we didn’t get more than we deserve.  Spanish church was about the [...]

I had decided that my lack of understanding of economics and trade and agriculture interfered with my story line in my (ahem) novel, so I was in the library hunting for a book that would rectify this weakness when I bumped into this one.  The book is about a huge corporation known as the United [...]

My grief over not having children is, to me, comparable to the grief of losing someone I care about to death.  In this case, I just don’t know who I lost.
Pastors love the story behind “It is Well with my Soul”.  Of course I’ve heard it a bunch of times, but it still made me [...]

I’m afraid this blog is deteriorating into a journal, meaning that I’m using it as a way to think through things as opposed to writing about things I have already thought through.
This abstract/concrete stuff may be a way of talking about how people look at things, and you have to look at them a certain [...]

A rainbow is formed by the separation of light waves passing through water. Very concrete and predictable in that sense.  But it is also a symbol of hope.  And it’s beautiful.  I was going to write a dialogue contrasting the abstract and the concrete, and I was going to start with rainbows.  Life seems like [...]

Sometimes I realize how profoundly shocking it is that I am childless- a long-held assumption of mine that may be just wrong.
I’m writing about it now because I don’t want my sense of fulfillment to depend on motherhood.  Getting to that point is a process, of course, and I’m hardly there yet.
The most common conversation [...]

We finally finished the last episode of season 7 this week.
I loved the ending- Captain PIcard finally joining the officers to play poker…but of course it was sad, too, since it was the LAST one….ah well, we are only on season 2 of DS9.

I won!  Well, ok, I didn’t actually finish first, but the awards committee decided that I should receive the first place prize for my “extraordinary efforts in preparation”.  They “attached special importance to my vision for a world in which exercise is important” and said that I had “created a new climate in the Baltimore [...]