I can hear Riley running behind me now, feet crunching on the glittering asphalt, her breaths ragged and shallow, and I smile, remembering a conversation I’d had with her about breathing.  Riley has been training to run a 5K. Here we all are, just a few days past Christmas, on the other side of the […]

Slowly we begin, feeling rumpled, and, somehow, still buried under covers, even though we, in our performance series shirts, have just stepped off the porch and into the first gentle light of morning. I look down at my running shoes, at the edges dirty with road dust, assessing, as though the shoes will be the […]

A hundred Loggerhead hatchlings struggle out of a nest. Zoe and Kevin and I happen to walk by on our way to save the world, our hands carving the air as we talk, our feet encrusted with sand. A woman waves to us, beckons with her arm, come and see, and I wonder momentarily if […]

Henry Blackaby, in his powerful study Experiencing God, taught me the life-changing difference between joining God where he already works and asking him to work according to my plans.  “We don’t choose what we will do for God,” Blackaby said.  “He invites us to join Him where He wants to involve us.” Riley has shown […]

The most effective training is hard. That’s what I tell myself as, on the exhale, I blow away the stray hairs that have slipped from my ponytail. Every other morning, I groan through a series of exercises meant to strengthen my core, which feels important to me as more and more natural “fairy hair” appears […]

He doesn’t want to cut the bushes. “Please don’t cutting the bushes,” Adam says to me first thing when I walk in the kitchen on Saturday morning, bending low as though unless he’s close to my ear I might not hear, that voice of his deep and gentle. I glance at the white board where […]

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 […]

From my office, I heard their voices, the soft, deep rumble of Father training son. “Do you still need Lantus?” Kevin asked Adam, who grunted over the forced pause.  What is it about us that we resent the time it takes to grow? Lantus is to long-release insulin what Kleenex is to tissue, merely a […]

Adam sloshes the rag around the sink, holding a corner with two fingers, dragging the cloth by the neck like some vile, unwanted thing.  He tried to convince me we did not have to do this.  “Already clean the bathroom,” he said, and on the floor, I could see an antibacterial wipe that missed the […]

Five o’clock and the day gasping, my children hang on me like satellites in orbit.  I stand at the sink, rubbing green beans between my fingers in a colander, the water rushing over, warm.  For a breath—just one—I wonder about where these beans grew–what close field, the color of the soil, the smell.  I wonder whose […]