“You’re a healer,” one of my friends says to another, as we sit encircling, an invisible linking of arms. What an absolutely lovely, gracious gift, to heal, and as spiritual gifts are given by God for the blessing of others, I see that my sister lives as a healer for me. I sit in our […]

In the hospital, the hiring manager for patient services has been telling Riley about a job serving meals to the hurting, the sick. “No one wants to be in a hospital,” he explains to her in his office, “and so sometimes the patients won’t be very kind to you or happy to see you.  They […]

In the early evening, my friends and I almost curl around a table scattered with puzzle pieces.  We gently share loose bits of our lives while we look for patterns of color and shape, our voices meandering lightly with our fingers, picking up topics and discarding them—laughter tinkling, or a sigh of concern drifting through […]

Three days I bake cookies as big as my hand—golden, caramel-sugar sweet, studded with chocolate and candy, a palm-full of sweet for the kids we will love in our church, with our church, on the last Sunday before Christmas.  A fat stack of self-sealing bags imprinted with snowflakes, for the cookies, sits on the bar […]

It is positively cold, the Advent night glittering, but we have come out anyway, following the light, looking for a glimpse of glory. Our dear friends and their tiny family huddle in a plywood sleigh, all pink cheeked and swathed in blankets and pom-pom hats, and only because the Lord is within me and everything […]

There’s something about sitting barefaced in the morning flanked by friends, the table strewn with gifts and paper and ribbon, steam curling over our mugs, the conversation like rivers meandering, that has me mulling a repeated snatch of scripture, stacked like ancient memorial stones, down deep below the surface of the living water. The Lord […]

Here we sit, Josh’s mom–my friend Camille–and me, two sisters, on a velvet sofa in a coffee shop called Lucky Tree, twisting cups in our open hands, talking, as mothers do, of life-giving. Oddly, it strikes me that when we get up and leave this place, an impression of our bodies will remain, lightening the […]

This morning a verse that I’ll carry all day, like a go bag or, a staff that bears my weight and steadies my feet: Continue steadfastly in prayer, staying awake in it with thanksgiving. I sat on my parents’ back porch for a while just receiving provisions, grace, from God, sipping coffee while the day […]

“Riley, before I met you, I was all alone,” Josh says gently, his voice a quiet trumpet. He stands in the middle of our Baltimore hotel room, gesturing toward her with one hand clawed around a balled-up t-shirt.  The thought has made him pause in his packing, as though it must be acknowledged before he […]

On the phone, the cheery woman from Miracle League Baseball (MLB) asks, “So what do you know about us?” Given Adam’s particular interest in baseball, I had filled out an online application for him. I relay to the woman what Josh, having played for years, has told me sometimes half-grumble, that in an MLB game, […]