So where are you going with this, Deb?" my sister asked me last night.

"Huh? What are you talking about?" (I was distracted and only half-listening.)

"With your blog," she said. "Where are you going with your blog?"

"Um...well, I started it and I'm working on the goal of getting healthier. You should see how quickly I walked home from services today!" (The quicker to take my Shabbos nap, as she well knows.)

"Okay, but you still need a more specific goal," she insisted. "Exactly where are you headed in, say, the coming year?"

My God, I thought, that's a sermon! Indeed, where exactly am I - are we all - headed? This is not simply a question about the direction of a blog, folks. The challenge of orienting ourselves and choosing a destination - why that's the task of this season! To think that my sister never went to rabbinical school, yet is still filled with so many homiletical insights!

Then my husband walked into the room. "Where's the key to the car?" he asked me. "I can't leave until I find the key." Another sermon! We need to search for the key, for the ikkar, for what is most essential, in order to move forward!

My daughter shouted from the kitchen: "Mom, I forgot to tell you that Bubbie called. You left your cell phone at her house." Hmmm, I thought, my mother had found what I had been searching for all along. What was lost can be located again. Another sermon!