“I’m so thankful God gave us such a beautiful day for our walk,” Riley says, and it’s like she’s reading my mind as I stare wide-eyed at flame-red leaves set against a cloudless sky, as I watch the sunlight dance, as I listen to my daughter, who once could not speak at all, describe what […]

I’m driving to school with Adam when the notification comes that Riley has texted, and I smile, knowing that she’s awake and is, as she always describes it, “encouraging everyone on the family Wordle thread.” I can see her in my mind, half risen on one elbow, sleep still hanging about her eyes.  I whisper […]

“You should try this on,” my friend says.  “These are your colors.” These are your colors.  Of course, she means the dress she has pulled out for me, the one that swirls with Autumn colors—olive, tangerine, crimson, gold, but I am thinking how, in scripture, a robe of colors means a robe of grace, how […]

I flip the page on a brand-new week in my planner, wagging my pencil back and forth in my fingers. I had expected to find space for a breath, a quiet stillness on the empty grid within which to pause and practice a Sabbath surrender before writing in my careful strategy for the week. We […]

By the time Riley comes to find me for our prayer, I have slid so far down into my pillows as to be almost completely horizontal, and, to be honest, I keep falling asleep, so the book in my hands keeps lightly knocking me in the nose and waking me up.  I have read the […]

Especially on Friday mornings, we feel the flat, sharp, immovable borders of our own built-in human limitations, and we groan, searching blindly for a Godly perspective. I’ve come to understand that this is the battle, although on the surface it looks, more practically, like Riley stumbling through our open garage door with teary eyes, her […]

I stand on my tiptoes a little now to brush Adam’s teeth, reminding myself not to hum aloud the thread of praise weaving through my thoughts because Adam will feel as though, while he’s already telling me it’s time to finish with his teeth, he must also ask me to stop humming, please, because the […]

At some moment toward the end of every sweet vacation–this time while cool, briny waters lick at my feet and the sun warms my bare shoulders; while I meander along and consider that the ocean looks both a clear, clean green in the rise of the waves and like quicksilver on the surface—I begin to […]

In our house, we have learned to keep time this way, in days since the last seizure, but this is not something we carry along, not at all like some battered suitcase stuffed with all our worries and dragged along behind, but rather something acknowledged and touched by our hands and burned in the pasture, […]

I am a stiff-necked woman. I smile as I think it, laying in the floor on an exercise mat that has seen better days, head on a folded beach towel I grabbed from the closet.  I count dust bunnies peeking out from their warrens—deep under the TV cabinet, beneath a wild tangle of electrical cords, […]