Guarantees are hard to come by these days. After sixty days of cancellations and loneliness, I feel like there are few promises I can make and keep anymore. My kids ask, “When can we play with other kids again? Will we have school this fall? Will we get to have birthday parties with our friends […]
I came to motherhood the hard way: with years of waiting and hundreds of negative pregnancy tests and enough tears to fill an ocean nearly as large as the hole in my heart. Sixteen years ago, we were going through our first round of testing for infertility, and I sat in church while the pastor […]
As fast as I could send them, they came back to me. Every day, nearly, there’s a letter in the mailbox. I thought I was the only one doing something old, something with scripted words that flow from a pen and hand cramps and premeditated thought rather than a screen with keys and clicking and […]
One night at dinner last month, my husband asked our kids what the term “sanctification” means. We’d been reading 1 Thessalonians together and got to chapter 4 where Paul tells us what God’s will for our lives is: our sanctification (1 Thess. 4:3). I don’t know if I ever noticed this verse until a few […]
I’m worn down. Early on, this isolation felt like a reprieve from our formerly busy schedules. No meetings, no pastoral visits that kept my husband away from home in the evenings, no ball practices or tutoring. No hurried school drop-offs or pick-ups. No cooking a meal for Sunday afternoon potlucks while scrambling to get ready […]
I didn’t know I loved you like this. A lot of mornings, I grumbled before I saw you. It was a lot of work to get myself together, to get the rest of us together, to put things in order just to get to you. And when I saw you, I took you for granted, […]
Now that many of us* are working from home, spending every evening at home, and generally finding more hours in our day for things like reading or talking walks, I thought I’d share a list of books and songs that you might enjoy. I tried to keep my list of books to titles that have […]
I was supposed to be on a plane today. I knew what I was going to wear, what was going in my carryon, how I was going to breeze through the TSA pre-check line, how I’d figure out the car rental process at the California airport. I was looking forward to dinner with a woman […]
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. […]
I didn’t buy toilet paper. I bought six pounds of rice and seven pounds of dried beans. I bought bouillon cubes and a couple extra sacks of flour. I stood at the grocery store and surveyed what was in the carts of other shoppers as I contemplated how far I could make ten cans of […]
