It was 1:30 a.m. Pain seared through my lower back, wrapping itself around my S. I. joints and radiating into the deepest part of my hips. I moved from bed to couch and back, rearranging the pillows a dozen times, applying ice and heat wherever I could. There was no relief. None. Tears dripped down…
God is faithful
Sorrow, Joy, and Forty Years
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…
Sometimes, I See the Stars
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…
I Lift Up My Eyes to the Fields
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…
You Can Break Now
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…
More and More
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…
Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
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….
Our Eyes Are On You
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…
The Promise is His Presence
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…
To the Friend Who is Hurting
Last night I laid awake most of the night. I told you that. I drifted from one troubled dream to the next, and every moment of lucidity was spent praying for you. I know you well enough to know you were awake, too. Today was a hard day for you. And because you are so…