I once spent a whole night worrying about a bug bite. Well, eight of them, to be precise. My son had been playing outside that afternoon and came in with a strange assortment of bites across his shoulder that didn’t look like anything I’d seen before. They weren’t your average Southeast Missouri mosquito bites, but…
Fear
The Other Side of the Fence
I have a recurring dream that I’m driving through my hometown looking for a coffee shop that doesn’t exist. If you know me personally, you know how apropos this dream is. On the hunt for a mythical coffee shop in a town I love? That sounds about right. In this dream, I make turn after…
At the End of the If
I left my house today. It was just for an hour and just for a quick two-minute drive to my husband’s empty office at our empty church building so I could have a quiet conversation with a podcaster via Zoom. But, it was odd to leave, even after just a few days of social distancing….
Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
All told, it was ten years of hard living. There was a future-emptying diagnosis, a move, a new job, a long-failing ministry, a chronic illness, an adoption that unraveled, a brain tumor, severe financial strain, incapacitating loneliness. It felt like too much sometimes, but it was all we knew: one trouble compounding another. And another….
When I Am Afraid, I Will Trust in the Carbon Monoxide Detector
It started with an innocent comment at a family gathering in our home about whether or not we smelled a natural gas leak, and it ended with me perched on a stool at 1:30 in the morning trying to pry the carbon monoxide detector down from the wall to be sure it was working. I…