I know your heart. That’s what my friend says, after I have rattled off a dozen questions at her, an interrogation like bullets flying, too fast, my thumbs shooting out over a digital keyboard. I am working when I see and respond to my friend’s message, sent because she too is working, both of us […]

“You need to get with it,” I say to Riley, like I do nearly a dozen times a day, then I jot down the phrase. Get with it. I taste the words a little, stare down at the shape of them, the jerking movement of the letters. Kirk Byron Jones has me watching my language […]

Caught up in the morning whoosh, I rush to the car, balancing my bag, my water, my phone.  I call out the usual things, looking forward but tossing the words behind me, a list of rapid-fire questions each beginning with “Do you have your….”  Adam walks out close behind me, lightly slinging his backpack over […]

This is such a crazy time, isn’t it?! In the end, it is something in every way tiny–a broken hairband, actually, popping and snapping against my fingers–that finally breaks my resolve.  It’s always that way with a slow crumble.  Millions of rips–unseen, unheard, unhealed–weaken the muscle until finally the barest graze finishes the work. I stand behind […]

Sometimes my hurry seeps into the most precious places. Sometimes I carry it into eternal spaces, into my living resurrected, into holy things not made for hurry.  Hurry is a temporal symptom.  It is a physical distraction.  Hurry is born of all that passes away. With a sigh, we lay our hands gently against our […]

You say grace before meals./All right. / But I say grace before the play and the opera, /And grace before the concert and the pantomime, /And grace before I open a book, /And grace before sketching, painting,/ Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing,/And grace before I dip the pen in the ink (~G.K. Chesterson, as […]

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. ~Dallas Willard, as quoted in The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith, 183 Sometimes I feel like a horrible mother. These are the days when I truly realize the power of grace, and these are the days when my thanksgiving for it is most earnest. Sometimes I feel […]