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 […]

“Hey, are you still praying about that stuff on our prayer board?” I hear Josh ask this of Riley as we ease in at a stoplight, on our way home from their classes.  Filtered through the fiery trees, late afternoon sunlight bathes the world in warm pinks and golds.  In the rearview mirror, I can […]

Caught up, as usual, in a morning flurry, I pause to hug Adam on my way out the door, to tell him I hope he enjoys his overnight field trip.  Most years, the staff at the school Adam attends arranges a stay in the lodge at a nearby park, where the school community does both […]

“This is where your shoulders are actually supposed to rest,” my physical therapist says.  She has taken muscle and bone in capable hands and has literally rotated my shoulders back and down, holding them carefully in place as I lay, yielded, on her therapy table. “I’m sure it feels weird, though, because your muscles have […]

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 […]

Dear friend, our work is worship. My sister-friend, who forever speaks God’s words back to me, sends this text in the early morning, while the daylight is still new, as I rub my eyes and contemplate the day, the work, that I know God has planned well ahead of me. They are burnt offerings. By […]

It’s evening here, where our feet beat a path down a dizzying urban road that smells like sunbaked asphalt and motor oil and sweat, like jasmine perfume and donuts and bitter coffee, where stars blink on the buildings as well as in the sky, lighting the night an inky crimson black.  The intersections pulse with […]

Here we are, home at last, our bags scattered on the floor in the doorway, dropped, like my young adults still discard their backpacks after school. You know the feeling, or at least I hope you do, what it’s like to come home after you’ve traveled away, when the touch of other places still clings […]

Down the stairs Riley comes, hair dangling in dark, wet, cheek-sticking ropes that send water wandering her neck in drops.  Fresh from the shower and wearing her donut-printed pajamas, she keeps a quicker pace than usual, purpose the wind beneath her feet.  She takes the stairs one foot at a time, instead of at a […]

For me, recovery is the hardest part of sprinting. Watch beeps and I look down, silently counting how many more intervals I have yet to go on this run, because the part I dread isn’t the sprint itself but the breath-starved gulping that comes when the effort is over.  Resolved, I spring forward, legs and […]