“I can’t–” “Here, I’ll help you,” she says, my Riley, who once said nothing. The kids at our table–this table, finished with glitter and glue and flecks of marker and fingernail polish, finished with a whole history of growing and laughing and living—these kids flat press their little hands on construction paper, tracing, jagged-cutting the […]

He presses the cross into my hands, a rugged, delicate thing he pulls from his pocket I don’t know how; it seems bigger than pocket-sized.  I run my thumb over the intricate carving on the stem and then let it rest on one palm so I can dip my fingertips into the tiny ravines.  I […]

“I didn’t even realize he was wearing his sweatpants,” I say to my friend, gesturing with one finger toward my son, over to the back of the auditorium where Adam now paces, ankles showing blank below lanky black, just above those bruised-up tennis shoes he likes.  I’m not even sure that the elastic on the […]

I can hear them from the kitchen.  Their laughter–giddy, riotous–bounces and floats, and every so often I catch a “yea, and–“, just the edge of a phrase, the words pointed and stretched for diving in.  They have left this solid, dusty, hungry place for another realm, for a place where garden fairies dressed in glittery leaves co-exist […]

My daughter is sixteen, so for her birthday we throw a big party at the building where our church meets.  And I receive this: a solid view of friendship. “Do you need help?” My friend asks, not in a maybe-I-can-do-a-few-things-if-it’s-convenient kind of way, but the way she always does, as though she’s already climbed up on that […]

In the late afternoon, I sit on the sofa holding a mug of peppermint tea, feeling the happy weight of a new cookbook in my lap.  For all our turning to technology, I still savor the turn of a page, the texture of paper in my fingers.  I glance up from the glossy photographs, the […]

My son digs the bills out of his left pocket, spreading them flat on his thigh.  He smiles–a small, delighted surrender, preparing for the giving. And somewhere long past—somewhere God can still see unfolding right with our present, a woman’s feet stir the dust as she walks purposefully toward Temple. Lightly, she walks across the […]

Well okay, not just the holidays.  I can’t ignore the resounding, soul-altering Comment:  This is not just for now. We linger, just souls pouring, and in those moments, walls fall.  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 […]

Sunday, she jams all of her money into a fish.  Three dollar bills, 2 quarters, 5 pennies, 9 nickels, and one dime—I watch her push it all deep inside with two fingers, hurried, urgent. My mom gave her the change purse for just this purpose.  That one dime lodges in the innards of the fish […]

You know, sometimes God says things to me with such strength, such PUSH, that I am crazy not to hear Him and insane not to move with Him.  He makes me laugh out loud, because He knows.  He knows He has to speak to me in a thousand different ways, and loud enough that even […]