Think about the places where you feel like you belong, the book urges, just like that, plain and simple on the page, and I think of my friends, who are reading this book with me, of their faces and our seasons of meeting together on a screen, of the wildly wonderful way God has assembled […]

“I met a new friend today,” Riley says, and it’s the first thing she wants to tell me about her first day back at school, the first thing she gushes, beaming as she walks through the door and out of the thick August afternoon heat. “Oh yea?” “Mmmhmm,” she singsongs, dropping her book bag into […]

Robert Frost would be proud: Every night Adam roams and roams for miles before he sleeps, up and down the same stretch of hall, his heavy tread pressing the carpet flat, beating out a path. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. In muffled pilgrimage, he travels overhead, across the living room ceiling and back […]

Just before sinking into bed, I put my phone on the charger and I see: Adam’s blood sugar has skyrocketed so high his continuous glucose monitor has stopped reporting a number. HIGH it reads, caps-shouting, double arrows pointing up, up, still going up! though no alarm has sounded. “Adam’s blood sugar is high,” I say […]

After dinner, we settle our forks on plates smeared delicious, and I give thanks. Around one sentence gather so many gifts: dinner, delicious, we. Adam stands, reaches for Kevin’s plate, then mine, stacking them with careful clatter beneath his own. His eyes flick past Riley, who still needs to finish a few bites, to Zoe, […]

Before morning light cracks the sky, Kevin drives away for work. In the headlight beams, I watch raindrops gently fall, but everywhere else, the morning looks blank and still. Coming up behind me, Riley wraps her arms around my shoulders. I lift a hand, folding my fingers into the sign for I love you, and […]

Home from a walk and still smelling like outside, that fresh blend of newborn and dying things, we walk into the living room. The Winter chill still pinks our cheeks. I know, because I see it still blooming on Kevin’s face as he shrugs off his extra layers, as I bend to plant a light […]

After dinner, gathered around the blessing-table, our emptied, sopped-up plates abandoned like islands, our bodies weary from the day, we feast on family. “We should play a game,” Kevin says, and I get up to look in the cabinet where we keep them. Adam follows, towering behind me, swaying like a pendulum. For Adam, stillness […]

The young man meets us in the parking lot, at the spaces reserved for guests. Before we can get out of the car, he’s walking purposefully our way, wearing a t-shirt that says, Welcome. And so it should be with God’s people, always wearing the welcome of Christ, always walking purposefully toward opportunities to love. […]

I remember sitting at a too short Formica table, overflowing a child-sized chair, in the play area where a couple of bright, shiny women evaluated my then two-year-old Riley. Riley, distractedly pushing platinum corkscrew curls away from her eyes, lined chunky animals along a busy, primary carpet in a long, snaking line. It looked like […]