Every day from the bathroom upstairs where Riley showers, the music pours, pooling on the floor and sliding under the door and seeping through the ceiling until the whole house floods with worship. God, I’m on my knees again/God, I’m begging please again/I need you/Oh, I need you It might as well be that we […]

On a getaway vacation, Kevin and I explore new terrain, hiking through El Dorado State Park in Colorado.  El Dorado means the gold or the gilded, a term that became popular in the gold rush days, when at another time people crawled this craggy land looking for the gold veining the Colorado Rockies, living hard, […]

I don’t know what it is about a free t-shirt, but when the emcee in the arena on watch party night for hockey invites us to get to our feet and make some noise, promising t-shirts, we stand, a whole crowd of us fans hollering like hyenas, waving our arms in the air above our […]

I step inside, temporarily leaving behind the crisp new light and the tittering of birds to go in search of more coffee, opening the door to an anthem of praise. Adam spins open-palmed, for seconds still unaware of me, his lifted face transformed by joy and peace. I stand still, my hand on the doorknob, […]

Restoration fills our talk of home. Kevin and I never finish the conversation. We watch Riley pause in every doorway whispering some memorized OCD monologue, bending at the waist like a bobblehead doll, and Kevin says to me, “One day, she’s going to fly through doorways.” Adam stumbles over answering a simple question, searches his […]

“It’s so pretty out here,” I say, the words like an exhale. Golden brown leaves skitter across the asphalt, and everywhere I look I see another vibrant shade–the sky, cool blue; the trees, a sunset arch sheltering our pathway. I breathe a prayer, remembering something C.S. Lewis said, something that fits: We do not want […]

We should give this hour a name, when the afternoon swells like a bruise and we all feel molasses-slow, our faces stretched into unending yawns, and still, we have work to do. I want to pour myself another cup of coffee, but I think I have consumed more than enough caffeine today, and something feels […]

I don’t know her name–not the sound of her voice, not even the shape of her smile. As it is these days, because of the mask she wears, her eyes—dark and determined and locked on mine–are all I know of her, those eyes and that hair, curling dark around her head in short, wild corkscrews. […]

Beside me, Adam’s voice breaks, shattering into silence. I glance over to read his face, careful not to linger lest he feel my gaze; he doesn’t like me to watch him worship. My son could care less if I walk in on him in the bathroom when he’s wearing no clothes and stepping into the […]

On the screen, a dozen boxes, a dozen tiny windows into lives and homes, begin to stack like bricks placed by an invisible hand. You can see me, with my bad posture and my tired eyes, a blinking stone already added to a living, breathing, growing thing. Zooming (Have we already verbed that word?) feels […]