My daughter is sixteen, so for her birthday we throw a big party at the building where our church meets.  And I receive this: a solid view of friendship. “Do you need help?” My friend asks, not in a maybe-I-can-do-a-few-things-if-it’s-convenient kind of way, but the way she always does, as though she’s already climbed up on that […]

Dinner time–almost, and already the crisp darkness makes our window panes cold beneath my fingers.  I switch on lamps to fill the room with light, light I hope will glow well beyond the house, slipping out around the edges of the panels of the curtains, beaming boldly through the glass.  And with the light, I pray […]

The hour turns, and my friend waves me over, patting the chair beside. All evening, we have all only wanted to surround her, this iron-strong friend strong enough yet to admit that she needs us to lift her.  It takes a brave woman to allow the veil to fall—whisper-light—from her face, to sit uncovered and honest, to […]

I hear the door open, and with that sound comes the volume of her sadness, the distinct sound of brokenness.  Tears always steal her breath the way they still steal mine, and before I can see her I hear that awful gasp, the way she hungrily stuggles for air.  She cries with her whole body.  The […]

Thank you, Lord, that we have plenty of food to eat. It’s a simple thing he says holding my hand, breathing deeply before God, just as I sit down with a sigh, just as I’ve gotten it all wrong and lost my grateful perspective. Five minutes and it’s time to take Zoe to school.  It […]

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 […]

So, I’ve been hurting over something we do to each other.  I say we because I’m guilty too, we because we’re in this together, we because it takes all of us to change our culture. In my life, the repetitive strategy of the enemy often looks like this, just with different supporting details: Flashback nearly twelve years, […]

Snow falls, and the gathering white arrests our attention.  Somewhere between bacon sizzling and deftly wacking the eggs against the clear bowl with the tiny chip just there, my phone rings.  An automated message from the school system.  The voice comes through just a little too loud, and I lift my coffee cup (poured steamy the second […]

I walk in, and she sits alone on the third row—she, only here to be with; she, who forgets how to breathe when being means there’s just too much to absorb.  She has the courage of a lion, and most don’t even know.  A movie flashes large on the screen at the front of the room, but I […]

“I understand sometimes she has a hard time, and I don’t mind.  I don’t.  You know?  I let things go.  I don’t make a big deal,“ she says quietly, sipping thoughtfully, sitting carefully across from me at a dot of a table. If we could but offer each other this, that we all make unintentional mistakes.Zoe jiggles […]