141Mar 21, 2014
Today, this encouragement: Write it down. In her lap, a piece of notebook paper sits folded, pressed beneath her hands. Â She picks it up, fingering the edges and the corner, where the paper turns up like a curling wave. From across the room, I can see the faint blue ruling, the holes at the edges, […]
142Feb 28, 2014
Go. Saturday morning and this is what he says, when I am struggling to wake up, when I am trying to remember how to think. How many miles today?  You should go.  Enjoy it. Enjoy it? Really? Weary growls through my bones. I switch on the lamp beside the bed.  Let there be light. He has […]
143Feb 21, 2014
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 […]
144Feb 7, 2014
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. Â I know the landscape by heart. Before I can […]
145Dec 6, 2013
It hardly feels like it’s been weeks now, weeks since we sat in my living room sharing friendship, talking about what inspires us.  And when these dear sister-friends of mine turned my question back to me, I said, “A million things.  A million things inspire me.” I listed for them just some and neglected many more, but […]
146Nov 22, 2013
Well okay, not just the holidays. Â I can’t ignore the resounding, soul-altering Comment: Â This is not just for now. We linger, just souls pouring, and in those moments, walls fall. Â The thunderous quake, the crashing of ugly pretense pushed down, is something I feel, something that shakes Heaven maybe, while here, our voices softly offer […]
147Sep 6, 2013
For my brothers and sisters roaming this desert land, wondering even now about the how: For you, it will maybe come out of nowhere, the way He spoke it.  Then again, maybe not. Through the middle, you be the tree in the wilderness, the tree that looks like my tree. He’d been leading up to it […]
148Aug 30, 2013
“1,2,3…Okay, Mom—I’m going to count how many people signed my yearbook. Â Let’s see how many I have.” And she begins again, confident that she has my attention. Â “Let’s see, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…and here I have 9, 10, 11, 12,”she says, counting the ones who wrote words and the […]
149Aug 23, 2013
Lay it down. Â That’s what you do. You press it in His hands hard the first moment you smell the rain. Â Don’t wait to surrender it. Cover yourself good, wrap up with Him, spend more time there, instead of less. Lay it down right then, and ask the people who love you to stand with […]
150Aug 9, 2013
I bring my children home in the afternoon, as the sun beats hot on the pavement, and the one talks so quickly the words stick to each other as they pass through her lips.  She has stories and I was like and then questions and what are we and then she fills in the space by […]