“1,2,3…Okay, Mom—I’m going to count how many people signed my yearbook.  Let’s see how many I have.” And she begins again, confident that she has my attention.  “Let’s see, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…and here I have 9, 10, 11, 12,”she says, counting the ones who wrote words and the […]

Sometimes my hurry seeps into the most precious places. Sometimes I carry it into eternal spaces, into my living resurrected, into holy things not made for hurry.  Hurry is a temporal symptom.  It is a physical distraction.  Hurry is born of all that passes away. With a sigh, we lay our hands gently against our […]

I admit it:  Sometimes my attitude stinks. I wake up heart sick—breathing sighs, swallowing complaint, coughing up rot.  It spreads quickly, my gray brooding.  Suddenly I look around, and my husband and children carry my heavy.  My ungratefulness wraps their shoulders, black and thick-chained.  And together we ache, weary of this place, and our blinded […]

I do not write in love if I do not write this clearly, and with all the urgency I feel: Jesus Christ, the Lamb Slain, the One Raised, the Word made Flesh, the Lord—the One and Only—He reshapes me. And He’s coming back. It will happen in the blink of an eye, but it will […]

Streaks of fire and amber color the clouds, royal streamers declaring another day done, and I sit down with the glory at my back and the warm, afternoon breeze tickling my cheeks. We love Summer for meals on the screened porch out back, where we can hear the birds singing loud and see the worms […]

Sometimes for weeks on end, I feel empty and lost.  Gone. I walk around like a shell of myself, dreading the things I have to do, wishing away the moments, missing the gifts. I chew on my own tongue, finding it hard to say the healing things. There’s this space, a gulf yawning wide between […]

There’s really only one place to start, only one space for the dying of seed, the breaking of ground. I stand in her doorway–just for a breath, my hand on the door frame, watching light cast aside shadows.  She rests, still cocooned, all possibility swathed in quilted blossoms.  I whisper thanks and ask for protection, […]

Thirteen years ago, God wrote it loud, carved it deep in the walls of our hearts: It doesn’t matter what makes sense. And because He knows I need things repeated, not quite two years later He traced over the words again, and the letters were block-shaped and quick.  He added this: And it doesn’t matter […]

Mom, come look. She says it breathlessly, wiping sweat and wild hair from her forehead with her hand. I stand at the sink, washing my hands with the honeysuckle soap, preparing to chop onions for our supper. “Come look at what?” I ask, drying my hands on a towel.  I reach in the cabinet for […]

It’s funny when it’s a game.* I mean, it’s inside joke material that will make us giggle for years, how I got my tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole became Iwo Jima in the space of fifteen minutes.  But the truth is, these strips of paper should be framed as reminders of this: I don’t have all the information. […]