Hello there! Good morning to you, he calls.  He has a brightness I can feel before I see him, even though I realize as I look up that his gear—suit, helmet, even the bike—is all black, like the deepest part of the night. I’m suddenly aware that I’ve been staring at the pavement, while he […]

Quiet in the kitchen, except for the sound of my fingers skooshing through flour and egg, sugar, spices; soft-thumping against the sides of the stainless bowl.  These cookies only come together by touch.  They resist the spoon.  Fall comes, and it smells of cinnamon and clove, candied ginger minced fine under the shiny, sharp edge of […]

I love wide, open spaces, those places that could never be arm-measured, that overflow conceivable depth and stretch further than sight; spilling over, covering completely, unbound, unheld, uncaptured. So today, because I need reminders, God sends us in a different direction, turning left on a road instead of the usual right, and this just as I […]

Most days, the last thing I hear before I lay down the day all empty and relax my weakened grip and let my heart rate slow is the sound of his heartbeat. It’s the sound that’s found by letting go. We sleep close; we always have.  And most days, I fit my cheek into a […]

Thank you, Lord, that we have plenty of food to eat. It’s a simple thing he says holding my hand, breathing deeply before God, just as I sit down with a sigh, just as I’ve gotten it all wrong and lost my grateful perspective. Five minutes and it’s time to take Zoe to school.  It […]

Stinging words curl through the grapevine like searing smoke, and I gasp, suffocating.  I am distracted by a black storm, by the flicking tongue of a squint-eyed snake bent on spreading its own dark poison.  The deception threatens the fixing of my eyes.  Except. Except that God is my Father.  And He hasn’t left me […]

“…this not making a name for yourself-—that’s really hard,” Zoe says, lightly biting her bottom lip, tapping the page with an extended finger.  Her hair falls loosely over her ears in sun-lit sections.  She rests her chin on one tender knee, peering down at the Book in her lap.  Her chair spins, but she interrupts its […]

In the morning, the rain comes, and I do what I have determined to do more and more these days:  I stop to see, to gather up the feeling of the breeze lifting my hair away from my cheeks.  I spy a plump cardinal hiding just inside the gardenias bobbing gently by the steps, an elegant […]

So, I’ve been hurting over something we do to each other.  I say we because I’m guilty too, we because we’re in this together, we because it takes all of us to change our culture. In my life, the repetitive strategy of the enemy often looks like this, just with different supporting details: Flashback nearly twelve years, […]

I confess that when she comes to get me, I do not want to get up. I just picked up my book—Dorothea Frank’s Plantation, and I have precious few moments to mind-leap on down to the Lowcountry and shut out the world.  Every time this author punctuates a sentence with the word yanh, I smell the […]