It only takes a moment for things to crumble. At day’s end, twilight throws last rosy beams across the kitchen table, lighting up flecks of glitter melted into the clear coat years ago during some school project, making Riley’s golden flyaways shine like a gossamer crown faintly visible on her forehead.  She has just finished […]

Stinging words curl through the grapevine like searing smoke, and I gasp, suffocating.  I am distracted by a black storm, by the flicking tongue of a squint-eyed snake bent on spreading its own dark poison.  The deception threatens the fixing of my eyes.  Except. Except that God is my Father.  And He hasn’t left me […]

I love everyone. Riley rainbow-writes the words on her hand in letters that look faded against her skin, some big, some small, some crooked where the pens slip into the valleys between her fingers.  It’s a God thing to write love into surfaces, into souls, into the tissue of our hands, but for her the […]

On the porch in the early morning and the light all new, I lift my hand in the air, bending my fingers into the sign for love.  And Adam, looking through the window as he leaves for school, tilts his head, studying the gesture.  He looks at his own hand as Kevin backs out in […]

In the morning, on the way to school, this is His nudge for me: You need to touch your daughter.   So I reach over and take one of her hands in one of mine, steering the car with the other.  Zoe doesn’t look at me, but she squeezes gently, running her thumb back and forth […]

Sometimes life strips us clean of words, and we sit together, quiet.  And maybe it’s that way so we’ll stop to listen. We walk through the rain and into the funeral chapel, gathering damp hugs on our way through the door.  We sit first, and then we stand, winding in long lines past photographs and […]

She could not have known about the day, its prickly criticism and thick heat, its challenge and pursed lips and ungracious attitude.  She could not have absorbed its unkind words.  She could not have known how it all felt gray, in spite of the sun, or how many times I wondered why am I doing this […]

In the car at night and I can’t see her face, just the blur of headlights and the jostle of cars weaving in and out of lanes, just the green-lit signs labeling exits.  From behind me, she speaks, and the tentative way she shapes her words tells me that she chooses this time for the […]

This always happens to me.  The thought settles hard, a bitter weed looking to root. Late afternoon, and I feel weary with trying.  We tumble out of the car like the dust we feel, and I am gripped by an overwhelming urge to lay in the grass and extend my arms and lose myself in the […]

It’s time to leave, so I stand at the bottom of the stairs and call to my son.  I hear his music, the fullness in the air that always colors the rooms where he moves, the strains of worship that make our living rich.  His feet thump against the carpet in an unseen stretch of […]