I was sitting with my back to them, the two young women sipping iced coffees and talking loudly in the quiet coffee shop. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could hear nearly every word of their discussion. Anyone in the shop could hear their discussion. I tried to absorb myself with my open laptop […]
There are 132 tiles covering the ceiling in my bedroom. It’s an old house, and when the addition was built several decades ago, the homeowners thought it prudent to tile some of the ceilings. Six of those 132 tiles still bear water stains from the spring of 2015 when we discovered our roof leaked. And […]
It was awkward at first. A good kind of awkward, but still. We felt the oddness of forced intimacy while the four of us sat at our local small-town coffee shop, carefully offering thoughts on the passage of Scripture we’d studied throughout the week and aggressively sipping our coffee when the gaps of silence got […]
I navigated the drop-off line at my son’s new school with a bit of trepidation. One lane split into two, and I carefully rolled to a stop at the crossing guard’s persistent arm-waving. My son opened the car door and paused to tell me goodbye before leaving the safety of my presence. On the way, […]
The first time a doctor spoke the word infertility to me, one of my closest friends had just had twins. Another close friend was pregnant, and then another and another until I tasted the bitterness of desperately wanting what you cannot have. Years later, in my husband’s new pastorate, we sustained loss after loss in […]
I can’t remember the last time I took a pregnancy test. It’s been a year, maybe. You’d think that fourteen years of infertility would put an end to desperate test-taking, but somehow, the tiny seed of hope that bears no fruit still has roots running miles deep. I wonder how many hundreds of pregnancy tests […]
I never heard the word ‘catechism’ until I was an adult. Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember reading the word in a book once as a child and wondering what it meant, pronouncing it cat-a-CHism in my head, with a hard CH, like in the word cheese. I grew up a Southern Baptist and […]
I can’t remember when I began praying with a list. It’s probably been five years or more, and I only tried it because at the time, my pastor-husband had shared with our congregation his methodical plan to pray for each member of the church throughout the week. A list, I remember thinking, a list might […]
Ordinarily I wouldn’t take a walk in the heat of July through the neighborhood with my two-year-old. But yesterday that’s what I did as we practiced hand-holding no matter what and not running into the street. What began as a short three-block walk to donate books to the Little Free Library was in actuality a […]
I was a junior in college when I realized she was a universalist. My favorite author, whose lyrical style and captivating storytelling filled my bookshelves, had finally shown her cards in one of her non-fiction works. I had to read the paragraph three times to realize that she had departed from the gospel of Jesus […]
