Reading for your Monday.

A favorite weekend moment: a bike trip to Quality Grocery for strawberry ice cream.

Here are a few little new-to-me articles from around the internet that I hope inspire your week as they will mine. Sip a steamy cup of coffee, take a deep breath, and get ready for a fantastic week.

+ Have you seen these Portraits of Reconciliation between Hutu and Tutsi people two decades after the Rwandan genocide? So powerful.

At the photo shoots, Hugo said, the relationships between the victims and the perpetrators varied widely. Some pairs showed up and sat easily together, chatting about village gossip. Others arrived willing to be photographed but unable to go much further. "There's clearly different degrees of forgiveness," Hugo said. "In the photographs, the distance or closeness you see is pretty accurate." 

+ I didn't know if it was possible to love Southwest Airlines more than I already do, but now their initiative in "placemaking" does the trick. Building a beach in downtown Detroit? Yes. 

In the past year or two, the airline has fallen for a cause that it feels matches its core values: "placemaking," a movement within the field of urban planning that leverages the people and assets in a community to reimagine its public spaces. In one of Southwest's more ambitious philanthropic initiatives to date, it has entered a multifaceted partnership with the movement's leading non-profit, Project for Public Spaces, in a wide-ranging commitment to improve and revitalize the public spaces in a number of American cities.

+ Are you an AT&T customer like we are? A friend posted last week that she had figured out how to save $60 a month just by changing her cell phone plan, so I logged in to see if I could do the same. Sure enough, I cut our monthly bill in half (saving $75 a month) just by changing to a plan that perfectly fit our needs and was way less expensive. Just log into your account online, go to the "my AT&T" tab, then "wireless," then "view or change my plan." You can compare the different plans, look at your usage, and make a decision. Man, I love saving money! Especially $900 a year in a matter of minutes.

+ This portrait of an evangelical funeral through the eyes of a Catholic man who'd never attended such a service is stunning. It's written beautifully, and the end brought me to happy tears. 

There was little sadness - and no purgative drunken wake. We were told not to wear suits and dark clothes, so the crowd was in greens and blues and whites (Joe bought a special pink plaid number just for the occasion). And the reason for this was quite obvious: almost everyone there, including myself, were completely sure that a) David was still there and b) his death was something to be celebrated if you loved him. He was certainly looking forward to it. His extraordinary wife, Kim, was effervescent and stunning in a white dress. She has been through hell and back several times in the last decade. And yet she wore that toll lightly today. The tears were for another time. The sobs for another one too.

+ The faith journey of Kirsten Powers is thought-provoking and inspiring. And I happen to love that Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church were big parts of her story.

Just seven years ago, if someone had told me that I'd be writing for Christianity Today magazine about how I came to believe in God, I would have laughed out loud. If there was one thing in which I was completely secure, it was that I would never adhere to any religion - especially to evangelical Christianity, which I held in particular contempt. 

Happiest Monday to you, friends!