On a Friday night eighteen years ago, we were setting up flowers and candles. We were practicing a processional. We were finalizing the order of service, the songs, the vows. We had a fancy dinner with our families and closest friends. We said goodnight and goodbye to our separate lives. Eighteen years ago, I went […]
My husband and I start and end our days the same way: walking loops through our neighborhood, discussing first what we think the day will be like, and later, how it actually went. My husband waves at absolutely everyone and will strike up a conversation with anyone within yelling distance. I wasn’t surprised, then, when […]
Last December, one of our faithful elderly church members passed away. As frail as his health had been prior to his death, his wife of seventy-one years had already been suffering from Alzheimer’s. She was recently moved to a nursing facility that specializes in the type of care she requires. As restrictions have recently lifted […]
A warm June rain soaks the world outside my window. We’ve had a few of those wild, humid summer storms that send us to the basement listening for the tornado sirens. But not today. Today, it’s just a good, gentle soaking. While I sit at my dining room table tapping away on my laptop, everything […]
Several years ago, I joined two other women from church for a weekly Bible study. I was no stranger to study as I’d been digging into the Word for years and growing by God’s grace through daily reading and prayer. I’d never really done this with others, though, and I wasn’t sure how it would […]
In January, my Bible study group began reading the book of Joshua. We finished this week. That’s nearly five full months in one book of the Bible. Week after week, we read a portion of the text and answered the same questions about each passage. We discussed faithfulness, obedience, idolatry, worship, war, apostasy, promises, covenants, […]
I well remember the exhaustion of brand-new motherhood. When my first son was born, I didn’t pick up my Bible for months. I was so sure that I’d arrive at the magical land of discipline later when my baby wasn’t so needy. I didn’t realize that keeping the habits of Bible reading and prayer when […]
When I was in my early 20’s I did not have any regular habits of Bible-reading or prayer. None. That hadn’t always been the case, but somewhere around the time I graduated from college, I allowed busyness and other pursuits to rule my time. I had every excuse: I was working a lot, I was newly […]
It doesn’t seem to matter if you know the end is near. You can still be surprised by death. You can feel its weight on your chest when you open your eyes in the morning almost three weeks later and wonder how in the world it happened. Has the sun really risen and set seventeen […]
My friend died on Monday. The end came after two long years of chemotherapy, low platelets, a stem cell transplant, multiple hospitalizations, and something called Graft Versus Host Disease that had whittled her body down to the barest vestige of life. The end was a long goodbye, weeks of preparing for what we hoped would […]
