I remember the year that opening gifts made my daughter weep. She stood in front of me, just there, tight blond curls falling haphazardly around her ears, belly pudging out the shirt of her Christmas pajamas, holding a silvery gift.  At 3, she still didn’t understand our expectant faces, or even what made toys fun, […]

Show time, and my friend’s four year-old daughter refuses to sing.  From where I sit some rows back from the stage, I have the perfect view of her eyes—wide, expressive, and determined; dark pools surrounded by sweetness.  She frowns, one of those grimaces that betrays an effort to remain fierce and resolute, shaking her head […]

“When I struggled so much with anxiety, God taught me to pray,” Riley says, lifting her hand and turning it over, as though neatly wrapping the words, a gift.  And then, when later we reach for each other’s hands, she quietly asks God to help her brother talk to us.  Maybe she’s just following Zoe’s lead. […]

Today, just a prayer, whispered, then fervid and carpet-muffled because that’s where I plant my nose.  I can’t seem to bend low enough to accommodate the feel of Him.  It’s a prayer I need, one I offer often in some garbled, half-torn way. But He knows all the parts, so I don’t have to remember them, […]

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 […]