I should have prayed right then, right out loud, right in the car.  I’m learning that. Mom, middle school is hard, she says, just as I’m scanning the road for anything I might have missed, just as I punch the gas and we dart across.  Navigating traffic always feels to me like being stuck in […]

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 […]

“…this not making a name for yourself-—that’s really hard,” Zoe says, lightly biting her bottom lip, tapping the page with an extended finger.  Her hair falls loosely over her ears in sun-lit sections.  She rests her chin on one tender knee, peering down at the Book in her lap.  Her chair spins, but she interrupts its […]

I like doing this with you, she says, and I look away from the wild roses just beyond us in the yard, their bold red beauty twisting madly toward the limitless sky, jutting elegantly through the slats.  Their freedom completely captures me, that and the way they’ve doubled in size, the way they reach in the […]

Standing in line, and the black belt whirs, moving my groceries forward and beyond me. Up here in the front of the store, it’s noisy and crowded.  Lines snake back, crooked and jammed.  Carts rattle.  In front of me, the tables in the cafe are full of people talking and eating.  A little voice cries […]

“Would you like an elephant plant?” She asks, holding up a tiny plant in a square pot–terra cotta orange, but plastic—a baby that moments later I cannot find. I’m not sure it’s actually called an elephant plant, but it might be.  She’s not the best for remembering the names of things, and she lifts this […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I start our dinner in the morning so that the smell of simmering will bring warmth to the house all day.  This is also my preemptive strategy to avoid that moment in the weary hours when cooking no longer feels like an art and I murmur there’s still supper, forgetting the ever-constant whisper of the Spirit urging […]