Early Monday morning on the run, I feel it full, the gnawing hunger growing in my fasted body, my stomach only a pleasing kind of empty; the gnawing hunger growing in my slowed mind, like shadows licking at the edges, making everything dim with an alarming sense of lack. Hungry, but hungry for…what? My body […]

Overnight, the snow fell, blanketing our back yard in pristine white, and as Kevin hands me a refill on my morning cup, steam curling and rising, I notice the new light has gone slightly rose, like the delicate petal of an opening flower.  I whisper a prayer that always rises in me when it snows, […]

Some invitations take a while to receive, and this one had surely waited for me, the corner of an old letter just barely visible at the edge, below a stack of things desperate for sorting, until came the day when, all that clutter finally gone, I at last took it up in my hands and […]

I keep coming back to this, Adam quietly ferrying gifts out the front door, packing our cars the day we traveled to my parents’ house for our annual family Christmas, how he met me at the foot of the stairs again and again, accepting boxes and baskets from my hands with silent happiness even though […]

Out on the run in the early morning, the light barely an hour old, Kevin and I wake up to the day together, having just come awake again to God, our blank hands turned up, open and empty. For years, it’s been like this, the two of us sipping our coffee in the predawn, desperate […]

It is positively cold, the Advent night glittering, but we have come out anyway, following the light, looking for a glimpse of glory. Our dear friends and their tiny family huddle in a plywood sleigh, all pink cheeked and swathed in blankets and pom-pom hats, and only because the Lord is within me and everything […]

A friend says, the text coming in gently, it must be hard for you to let her just walk through that door. Yes, I type.  Yes. I sit in the car, waiting while Riley digs her bookbag out of the trunk, talking to herself in a soothing, rhythmic way.  She turns to look at me […]

I watch Riley’s face as she describes her first in-person day in vocational school, how animated she has become, how her eyes shine and her smile deepens, her voice lilting while she recounts all the details to a close friend of mine who, having come over with a tray of baton cookies in her hands […]

We walk the winter road like Job’s friends, the three of us–Riley, Josh, and me, coming from a distance, the wind whipping at the hem of my black lace dress, the edge of Josh’s dark coat, the smooth ends of Riley’s brassy bob.  Riley’s eye shadow looks, I notice just this moment, like smudges of […]

“So many people still have their Christmas lights out,” Kevin says, speaking our mutual thought aloud into the chilled night as we drive home, as we slow to absorb the weighty glistening that somehow makes everything else feel a little lighter. In every season, twinkling lights remind me of Jesus, the Light the darkness can’t […]