I was baking cookies for my neighbors when my mother-in-law texted me. “Don’t forget to look at the star tonight!” she wrote. Elbow-deep in cookie dough for peanut butter blossoms and linzer cookies with strawberry jam, I watched the clock and the sunset and waited for the right time. When the last lights of the […]
Every year, in the days following Christmas, I make promises to myself. Weary of traveling for most of the holidays, sleeping little, and eating one Christmas dinner after another, I spend the last days of December mapping out a healthier life plan for the new year that includes more vegetables, earlier bed times, and less screen […]
Last December, I decided to memorize the book of James. I’m not a goal-oriented person. I don’t like setting expectations for myself. New Year’s resolutions are not something I make or stick to. I have never chosen a “word of the year,” and I get anxious just thinking about those yearly planners that encourage you […]
I pulled a loaf of sourdough bread from the oven and popped it onto the cooling rack before getting out a blank greeting card and pondering what to write in it. I didn’t know my new neighbors’ names, so after jotting down our names and phone numbers on the inside of the card, I simply […]
I’ve long used January 1st as the day I’m going to get my life together. New diet? Clean slate starts January 1st. Exercise plan? I’ll begin on the first of the year. Keep the Tupperware cabinet from throwing plastic containers at me every time I open it? Organization will commence on the first day of […]
Yesterday, I opened my Bible to the passage in Hebrews 12 I’m studying with my Bible study group, and I read it a few times before closing my Bible and thinking, “Well, that felt a little pointless.” At 5:30 a.m., my brain was foggy, my thoughts were tangled up with both the events of the […]
In the afternoons, I spend more than an hour sitting in two different carpool lines to pick up my kids. Living in a rural area, one of those lines is flanked by fields. Cotton on one side, soybeans on the other. This afternoon, I rolled down the windows in my van and let the breeze […]
I remember what I was wearing the first time I held each of my children. Not hospital gowns, for my kids didn’t come to me that way. With my oldest, I wore a black blouse with white stitching around the neck and arms. I had a short, angled bob with blonde highlights at the time. […]
Someone asked me recently, “How do we remain faithful to the Lord when the world is just so distracting?” Without saying it, I knew this conversation was about input. Between my phone, computer, podcast app, and television, I can get to the end of a day and wonder what in my life fed my faithfulness […]
Summer is loosening its grip on things. It’s still hot down here in southern Missouri—over 90 degrees today—but you can tell that the air is different. The humidity has drained away, leaving a still-warm breath that crackles now instead of steaming. It’s our first sign that things are shifting. I took my usual morning walk […]
