I know how you feel. Days come when I wake up and think, I don’t want to do this. I feel like the husk of a woman, emptied. I am clay, a bowl dusty from the kiln, all scooped out by the master’s hand and cooling in the ashes.  With His fingers He has crumbled and […]

Thursday morning, I push a table knife right through the bottom of a glass jelly jar. Nothing shatters.  Nothing cracks.  The knife jabs in more deeply than it should.  And turning the jar upward on a diagonal, I see the flat, silver, jelly-smeared tip of my knife jutting messy through a rounded, toothless gape, all […]

I’m a runaway, convinced to stay by the love of a God who sees me. “Where have you come from and where are you going?” God said her name, mentioned details about her life, and then the question.  Hagar was an Egyptian, a slave, no one He should have sought.  She was an expectant mother used […]

We’re sitting in a circle, you and I, with half a dozen other people we love.  It’s late at night, past the hour when everyone started yawning, past the time when we all ambled into the kitchen looking for snacks, all the way past pitch dark and silence to that hour when the world seems […]

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. ~Dallas Willard, as quoted in The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith, 183 Sometimes I feel like a horrible mother. These are the days when I truly realize the power of grace, and these are the days when my thanksgiving for it is most earnest. Sometimes I feel […]

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And […]

There are times, when if I had those red shoes, I’d smack the heels together until my feet hurt. The longing for home aches deep, a hunger that won’t go away.  I’m not talking about the home I live in here that still stands (praise God) 100 feet—if that—from utter devastation.  I’m talking about the […]

When I was a girl, my parents drove the precursor to my own swagger van: the gargantuan station wagon. The first station wagon Dad and Mom owned was white, and they drove it until a drunk driver plowed into the side of it as we were traveling through an intersection, spinning it around and shattering […]