My alarm clock was pretty rude this morning. Five-thirty is pitch dark. The remains of an all-night thunderstorm hung about the air, making my bed the obvious first choice. As my feet hit the floor, as I hunted for my slippers and shrugged on a long cardigan, as I headed to the coffee pot in […]
I picked out a tune on my grandparents’ old Wurlitzer when I was quite small, plucking the keys to make a melody I recognized. I could hear harmonies before I knew what they were, so my parents signed me up for music lessons when I was seven. I learned basics with one teacher, then switched […]
“Hope” was our word. The friend who discipled me during my early twenties reminded me of hope often. We traded it back and forth like a sweater that fit us both perfectly. I borrowed hope when the pregnancy tests kept coming up negative. She took it back when loneliness and singleness chafed. Back and forth, […]
I sat in the optometrist’s office with a searing headache behind my eyes. That’s partly why I was there. The more pressing reason was that I couldn’t see very well. Everything had gone foggy a week before. No matter how I tried to blink the fog away, it clouded my vision as though I were […]
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. […]
The heat of summer in our little corner of the world has turned everything stale. The trees are beginning to turn, but I think that’s more from heat than from the coming of fall. My husband and I often take our kids to ride on a local bike path on the edge of town. Several small bridges take the bike trail […]
The first time I saw him, I was still in high school. This isn’t a high school sweetheart story, because he didn’t remember my name when I bumped into him a year later. No, the first time we met, I was the only high school member of a college worship team making the two-hour drive […]
I don’t know where the book came from. I didn’t buy it, don’t remember either of my kids opening it at Christmas or birthdays. Probably, it sneaked in with a pile of hand-me-down books from a neighbor or friend. I rarely say no to books anyway. However it got here, the book about pet monsters was perched […]
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 […]
On December 13, 2014, I wrote the following words in my journal in the midst of an excruciating battle with bitterness and pain: I’m realizing that He has loved me all along. Has been with me every day, especially the dark ones. He never abandons His children. He will always keep His promise of His […]
