I think I bought the pants before the pandemic began. I can’t remember, to be honest. But we’d had a series of deaths in our small congregation, and being a work-from-home mom, I didn’t own anything quite right for a funeral since I hadn’t attended one in a while. I found myself standing at a…
ministry
Dinnertime Devotions and Gospel Hope
I made too much chicken. That’s how it started. Too much chicken. As I cooked dinner last night, I thought through my day, mentally adding things to tomorrow’s to-do list, stepping out of the kitchen periodically to address sibling squabbles in the next room. Moving between tasks, I prepared twice as much chicken as our…
The Church Beyond Your City Limits
I live in a small town in rural Missouri. Farmland surrounds the town, creeping inward in places. The local kindergarten building sits across the street from a corn field, and our little church is flanked on two sides by cotton fields. My husband and I moved here nearly fourteen years ago for my husband to…
Writing as Ministry
There’s a lot of chatter these days about writing and blogging and the merits of doing both whether anyone is reading or not. Though we hardly need another voice to add to the mix, the beauty of blogging allows me to offer my thoughts on the subject simply because this tiny corner of the internet…
I Love You in Iambic Pentameter
for William The first time he wrote a sonnet for me, I was finishing my senior year of college and struggling through a Shakespeare class. This was after he bought a book of the bard’s sonnets and tore a page from it every time he wanted to tell me he loved me. Sonnet 116 was…
Church, You Must Do Better.
I had the privilege of speaking to a group of over one hundred pastors’ wives this week at a conference. In the weeks preceding the event, I had prayed much about what to share with this group of women. I’ve been a ministry wife for over fifteen years, specifically a pastor’s wife for more than…
The Bad News is Really Bad
“I’ve got bad news, kids. You’re terrible people.” That wasn’t my exact opener for my Wednesday night kid’s class at church, but it might as well have been. We’ve been going through Old Testament history for a few months and are currently working through the judges material. My synopsis of the book of Judges was…
The Strongest Thread
It was mid-October a year ago when my mom had brain surgery to remove a tumor from her left frontal lobe. Hovering over the place where her speech and emotions live, the tumor had grown quickly enough to cause a seizure and lost time. I remember how nervous we were when it all happened on…
Future Discipleship Part 2: God’s Part in Our Perseverance
When my husband and I first settled into rural church ministry twelve years ago, I was a little unprepared for the pace of life offered by the farming community where we had made our new home. We had left a much larger college town buzzing with traffic and commutes, a life where I’d had a…
I Prayed for Healing. He Answered with His Presence.
These are slow summer days, stretching long at the ends from first light to last. We drink them in deep swallows, savoring the absence of hurried schedules. We sleep later than normal and wear pajamas longer than we should. The hours unspool without our notice or care. It seems a luxury. I’ve not had such…