Beside the pool in the late morning, he suddenly kneels, leaning out over the water.  Majestic clouds move across an unfathomable sky, changing the clear light as it travels down and washes over his bent body, the rustling trees, the white plastic chairs in orderly, framing lines.   From my chair, I pause, gathering him […]

Sometimes we finish the day in rags and mud, and the things we carry cover us like a tomb.  And it’s testimony to the Light in her that even though she’s afraid to be embarrassed, she says I can write about this, our walking through together. In my arms, she trembles.  “I just want to […]

So maybe today–maybe in this—it’s time to press on, even though it’s hard, and it hurts, and you want to give up. “But I’m dying,” she says to me, gasping, sweat gathering like a halo along her hairline.  She’s waiting for me to say she can quit, but I am not so easily convinced. “You’re […]

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 […]

I walk into the kitchen from the garage, carrying an armful of things—a bag, a few books, a coffee mug someone left behind—on my way to distribute these and consider the afternoon climb, and one of my daughters presses into me, draping the now dangling legs, grasping me solid, clinging to me with now enfolding […]

Sometimes from the start of a day a dull ache builds, spreading slowly from the curve of my back well into the sharp edges of my shoulders.  It is the sore feel of self dying, the good ache of need, the one meant to remind me that God accomplishes and satisfies (Deuteronomy 8:3).  But the truth […]

Rigidity is a Spectrum curve, one we’ve worn to a polish, fast slipping our way through so often that we know the feel of it by heart.  After all, we’ve got not one track here, but two, and even though the trajectories spin differently, that particular curve is common to both. Something starts fresh, like […]

Maybe—when I capture it here in flat black letters and solid lines, when I carefully trap the moments still within the boundaries of words—it will not appear as romantic as it really is to me: the two of us, finally side by side again at the end of the day. But then, the true value […]

At the chiropractor’s office, we take up the whole row of cervical traction units against the wall—Riley, Adam, Zoe, me.  We all know the routine.  We slip the padded bars behind our heads, rest our chins on the thick foam in front, grip the ends of the chin bars with our hands.  Riley and Adam […]

In the last fifteen minutes before we rush off to school, I gather her hair in my fingers, smoothing the strands with my thumbs. I trace the unseen bumps and grooves along her scalp and map them in my mind, the geography of her, the feel.  I know the landscape by heart. Before I can […]