As she walks, baby girl holds on to my friend’s finger for dear life, just the one, in a white-knuckled grip. “You can do this on your own, sweet girl; you don’t need me,” my friend is saying, her coffee forgotten and growing cold on the kitchen table. Baby girl keeps taking those exaggerated steps, […]

“Are you Adam’s mom?” Our young friend Becky asks me, lightly fingering a little-girl hairclip at the side of her head, looking up at me with wide, quiet eyes of fathomless blue.  I feel touched by the hint of wonder in her expression. Becky must be in the third grade.  I had watched earlier as […]

When I open the email about Adam’s blood work, I have just finished telling the Lord that I don’t understand why everything always has to be so hard.  I know that everything and always are sweeping, emotional words, but God is a sweeping, omniscient God who doesn’t need me to “pretty up” my feelings.  I’ve […]

I pray with Riley at night. After she brushes her teeth, she comes to get me, shows up beside my bed like she used to as a child, and I lay aside my book and pull my body back out of bed and slow step my way across the hall to her room.  Sometimes I […]

At the water park, we wait in a sunny line on a meandering sidewalk bordered by honeysuckle just past the bloom, holding our rafts, rafts that will soon take us down a waterslide.  As a group, we exude anticipation, a chattering hope spurred on by the whooping sounds of delight we’ve heard all along our […]

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 […]

“I’m concerned about Adam’s schedule for the summer,” Riley says to me, folding her hands in front of her and digging one toe into the outdoor carpet on our back porch. The hinges of the door haven’t yet stopped screeching, and a great wind rustles the leaves of the trees, and I take a deep […]

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, […]

“But, I’m not a baby,” the boy says, looking at up at me petulantly, with dark, bottomless eyes, his lips pursed in a pout.  “I’m eight.” Suddenly, I remember the voice of Jesus, calling us all his little children, even though some of us like to think we’re adults. I had called the boy Joshua […]