MSI Press Blog

Courage is usually described in battlefield terms — the charge forward, the split‑second decision, the willingness to risk one’s life. But for veterans exposed to Agent Orange, courage took on a different shape. It became a long, quiet practice: the courage to live with uncertainty, to face diagnoses that arrived decades after service, and to keep building a life even when the future felt fragile. 1. The Courage of Knowing What Might Come For many veterans, the first act of courage was simply absorbing the truth. Learning that a chemical they barely noticed in Vietnam could cause cancer, heart disease, neuropathy, or Parkinsonism required a kind of emotional steadiness that few people ever need to summon. It meant living with the knowledge that: bad news could arrive at any time, symptoms might appear without warning, and the body might carry a danger planted years earlier. This is not fearlessness. It is the courage of continuing anyway — of going to work, raising children, paying bi...

  Empathy doesn’t arrive fully formed. It grows quietly, through the way children are treated and the way they see others treated. You can’t force it, but you can plant it — in the soil of daily life, where kindness and awareness take root. Children learn empathy by watching how adults respond to emotion. When they see you pause instead of react, listen instead of dismiss, comfort instead of correct, they begin to understand what care looks like. They notice tone, timing, and the small gestures that say, “I see you.” Empathy deepens when children are allowed to feel their own emotions without being rushed past them. A child who’s comforted when sad learns how to comfort others. A child who’s respected when angry learns that feelings don’t make someone bad — they make someone human. It also grows through stories and shared experiences. Reading about lives different from their own, helping with small acts of service, noticing when someone is left out — these moments teach perspective...

  From Morning Prayer" “All peoples, clap your hands; cry to God with shouts of joy.” — Psalm 47:1 We hear/read that line in Morning Prayer so often that it’s easy to glide past it. Of course, people clap. We clap for concerts, for birthdays, for a good sermon, for a child’s first steps. Clapping feels universal, instinctive, almost hard‑wired. But where did it actually come from? And has it always meant the same thing—especially in worship? The short answer: clapping is ancient, but its meaning has shifted dramatically across cultures and centuries. Psalm 47 is not talking about applause after a choir anthem. It’s talking about something far older, far louder, and far more communal. 1. The Deep Origins of Clapping Anthropologists will tell you that clapping is one of the earliest human sound‑making behaviors. It appears in every known culture. Infants clap before they can speak. It requires no instrument, no training, no social class, no literacy. It is the most democratic of h...