On Monday morning, I wake up sore. Before I open my eyes, a shadowy thought moves through my mind: I can’t do this. I will not be able to do this. The weekend had been consoling and also desolate. On Saturday, Kevin and I had painted walls (renovation!) until our hands and feet felt swollen […]

Into the thin of night, during those turbulent hours when panic threatens the best of our rest; during those hours when the conversations of young friends become so exposed that with raw, sleepy voices they begin to truly know each other; during those hours when so many souls bound for home finally drift away; into […]

Spiritual formation is renovation of the soul. That’s what I’m thinking as I empty the drawers of an old desk into a tote, as I shake my head over the accumulation of the years. In the deepest drawer, I find a knot of cords, and I smile, thinking this is how my thoughts would look […]

The moment I return from my morning walk, Adam starts to move, like a pinball set in motion by the click of the front door. I hear his footsteps, purposeful and solid, before I actually see him, and just as I walk into the room, he snatches a sticky note from the edge of the […]

It can be easy, in a whisper, to thank the gift without thanking the Giver. It sounds ridiculous to say it out loud, but in the evening, sitting cozy while the darkness gathers outside, we admit this to each other. I fold my legs up in the chair, thinking of the way my gratitude sometimes […]

At the end of service, we pray, a passel of kids of every age, and it feels to me as it used to in the afternoons of my childhood when my dad would stretch out in the living room with his head on a pillow and my brothers and I would come at him from […]

“So for some reason, this verse made me think of you,” my friend says, flicking her finger back and forth on the edge of an index card as we settle onto her porch beneath warm party lights glowing in the cloudy afternoon and ferns gently swaying. I cradle the coffee cup in my hands and […]

My friend gives me the cross as a gift, just lays it in my palm, and it isn’t until that filling, the cool, solid weight of olive wood resting against my skin, that I realize how empty-handed I’ve been. “I found these online,” she says, giving one to another friend too, because together, we make […]

Kevin and I set out for our walk in the early morning, while the air is crisp and new light glows soft pink. We smile over the volume of the birds, how they chitter and squaw from fence post to power lines to the peaks of the trees, sentinels passing messages. We gesture and smile, […]

The first time we walked into the eye doctor’s office, the top of Adam’s head came up to my waist. I remember the feel of his baby hand, the way his soft, stubby fingers tried in vain to reach my own. I gripped his wrist to be sure he wouldn’t wander. At the time, the […]