The Spirit says, pray, so we do. Happy Friday, friends!

Late afternoon, I fold bath towels, touching the unraveling sides with my fingers, thinking of all the skin these towels have dried, all the cleaning, all the blessing in their worn softness; thinking this can happen to bodies too, that I want to age and unravel through years of humble service. The warmth of the […]

“It’s Monday!” Riley says, with the day still so new that the morning light looks soft and tentative and the chill outside clouds the windows. My favorite backyard tree looks bony and bare, empty-handed and reaching like me, but Riley glows like a sun-drenched bloom, pink-cheeked from sleep, bright with anticipation. I look up at […]

Into the night and our deep sleep comes the blare of an alarm. History repeats.  Emergency emergency wake up wake up, the alarm screams, and cartoon me jumps up and runs immediately into the wall, while the real not-yet-lucid me picks up my phone, swings my legs over the side of the bed, and pulls […]

“That’s so sweet,” Riley says, head bent over her phone. At first I forget to respond, or am at least so focused on traffic and stuck in my own muddled mind that I don’t, even though I hear her. So she repeats the comment, glancing up at me, “Aww, that’s so sweet,” her emphasis like […]

At the end of service, we pray, a passel of kids of every age, and it feels to me as it used to in the afternoons of my childhood when my dad would stretch out in the living room with his head on a pillow and my brothers and I would come at him from […]

Kevin and I set out for our walk in the early morning, while the air is crisp and new light glows soft pink. We smile over the volume of the birds, how they chitter and squaw from fence post to power lines to the peaks of the trees, sentinels passing messages. We gesture and smile, […]

The moment I walk in the door, all road-weary and distracted and wondering how it is that pilgrims who don’t have to walk everywhere still come home feeling sore and dusty, I hear Riley praying. Her voice sounds clear, an unbound sound traveling the hallway and down the stairs. As I mounted the steps and […]

“Mom?” Riley reaches into the cabinet to my right, rising up on her toes behind me, leaning like a shoot. I wash dishes at the sink, my sore hands soothed by the hot water, the soft soap. The bottoms of my feet hurt from standing so long, and at the end of an afternoon spent […]

“So Adam, what did you do at school today?” The question, admittedly, feels familiar and worn, like a knob on an oft-opened and oft-slammed door, one we open today like every other day, honestly anticipating nothing save blank space. And for how long, I wonder, sitting here wearing my end-of-the-day weariness like grave clothes, can […]