Maybe it started with the letterboard sign that caught my eye in September, when it shouldn’t have felt like Fall outside but did, when something inside my heart pulled me toward surrender. I decided to actively anticipate the change of season, to savor the subtle shifts in the light of day, the darker nights, the […]

Bea and I have been talking, lightly, about the weather.  August has felt milder than usual; we’ve already felt Fall drifting in on leaf-rustling breezes. We’ve enjoyed our thoughts of cozy things. Bea schedules transportation for the city, and she told me to ask for her by name, made up her mind to be a […]

On the same day my sister-friend tells me in the morning that she has an alarm set on her phone to pray for me—just me, the chime stopping her mid-sentence, the two of us standing on a windswept corner anticipating rain–that everlasting reminder of God’s kindness, with a flurry of leaves skittering all around our […]

I love to sit on the cool dark porch just before dawn, listening as birds twitter and sing at such volume I imagine their banditries and bevies and breasts crowding the limbs of the trees with jumpy, sometimes swoopy chaos.  There comes a disembodied tuning, the calls and responses not unlike the huddled collaborations of […]

It comes to me, the freedom in not needing to know, like the tickle of a wild wind on my emptied palms, when a friend asks what time our flight, Kevin’s and mine, leaves for Boston. We walk down a greenway trail, around a bend I’ve never seen, in a place I’ve never been, near […]

“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 […]

My body groans this morning, acutely I feel it crumbling, as Kevin and I head out for an early run, searching for renewal, and not just of muscles and tissues and cells.  Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, the apostle Paul wrote, and as our feet begin to tap staccato, I remember the […]

As we step onto the path, past the gravel and asphalt and through an arbor of trees to the place where the air grows light and cool, I realize two things: I am not wearing the right shoes for this hike, and consequently, I need a walking stick. Roots ripple across the path, rising up […]

A hundred Loggerhead hatchlings struggle out of a nest. Zoe and Kevin and I happen to walk by on our way to save the world, our hands carving the air as we talk, our feet encrusted with sand. A woman waves to us, beckons with her arm, come and see, and I wonder momentarily if […]

“It’s so pretty out here,” I say, the words like an exhale. Golden brown leaves skitter across the asphalt, and everywhere I look I see another vibrant shade–the sky, cool blue; the trees, a sunset arch sheltering our pathway. I breathe a prayer, remembering something C.S. Lewis said, something that fits: We do not want […]