The grass glitters with frost, twinkling Messiah-lights that will remain long after Christmas. Long after we have packed away our bulbs and vacuumed away all traces of the tree; after we, traveling on to January, have stopped announcing our King, all creation still will proclaim His praise in a language understood in every nation. I […]

Walking down the Winter road, everything the color of bone, you could miss all your new beginnings. Faster, faster. Even the street seems like a challenge to hurry, the landscape like a warning. Time is running out. The bare trees reach, branches like skeletal fingers, like venous tributaries invisibly leaking life into thin air, like […]

Warm greetings in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ, wishing you success in your labors. Elisa’s letter open in my hand, I walk into the kitchen, taking in the shape of things, the accumulation of emptied lunch boxes, the scattered crumbs from my children’s after school snacks.  Elisa lives in poverty in Equador, the […]

I walk and let things go, whispered things, all the heavy and daunting things pressed against my shoulders like so much Winter weight, damp and thick and flat grey; things that cannot be at all what they seem.   This weather inspires every kind of ache; all day the clouds have swallowed us.  And if this […]

In the morning, he puts a cup in my hands, french-pressed and steaming, the flavor deep, and I sip, letting the new day develop.  My chilled fingers begin to warm to the living ahead of me, living that surely overflows the banks and spills, splashing.  I crack the blinds and watch light overtake darkness, slowly, […]

Late afternoon, as the light begins to die after an afternoon finger-wrapped around steaming mugs and my kids home early–bursting through the door with a weather report, I put the glittering sign on the mantle, Let it Snow.  The letters glow, burnished and glinting with warm light.  This time of year, I think about people who […]

In the picture, taken all-smiles just after the coronation, our Queen stands twinkling in her strappy, snowy dress.  Somewhere else maybe she would not have been a royal, but here, we celebrate her, and with her the two kings by her side.  The kingdom belongs to such as these (Mark 10:14), and if ever I’ve […]

It really wasn’t until we turned into the neighborhood—5 minutes, maybe, from home–that the ice really made me nervous.  An hour and a half away, we’d started to see a dusting, just bits of dazzling white in the grass; here and there, a glassy ditch or frozen puddle. If it’s like this here, Zoe murmured then, […]

I have kept my shoes on all afternoon for just this mad-rushing, this quick gathering—the blankets slipping from my arms. “Come on, you guys, come on,” Zoe says, and we hurry to huddle in the dark, pressing our bodies into each other. They say that the best place to be in the wind-ripping event of […]

Late afternoon and the light begins to fade, and we widen the gaps in the window blinds, tugging the dangling strings with our fingers.  Usually, I close up the house instead; slide the curtains closed against the coming dark, press my fingers flat against the chilled window panes.  Tonight though, I switch on the lamps […]