When I saw them, I was in the orthopedist’s waiting room with my son who was getting a cast on his arm after an unfortunate backwards tumble from a swing. Quietly, I pointed her out to my son, “Look, she’s in a sling and a splint like you are. I wonder if she fell, too.”…
love
Encircled, Enclosed, Squeezed In
The longest my husband and I have ever been apart is eleven days. He went on a mission trip to Malaysia many years ago, and my young son and I spent most of our time counting down the days until we were all together again. I struggled to sleep at night while William was on…
An “I Love You” Family
Ours is an “I love you” family. We tack on the phrase to our sentences like punctuation. “I’ve got to run to the store. I love you!” “I’m heading to bed. Love you.” “Be careful driving. I love you.” I didn’t know this wasn’t a universal practice until I was in middle school and realized…
Sometimes We Forget He Loves Us
Sometimes I forget that God loves me. Or, to be honest, I choose not to believe that He does. I look at my daily failures, at my favored sins of pride and anger—and I think that I must be such a disappointment to God. Yes, He saved me, but look at what a mess I…
She is Broken, and She is Beautiful.
A week ago, the phone rang before dawn. There’s never a good reason for calls so early, and my heart immediately began pounding when I answered the phone. A dear church member was on the other end, her voice thick with tears and panic. Her husband had died unexpectedly in the early morning hours. It…
How to be thankful when you’ve had a hard year.
I cannot picture eating turkey on the fourth Thursday in November anywhere other than my grandparents’ rural Tennessee home. Perched on a hill and surrounded by trees, their home is large and sunny with an embankment on the back side that slopes downward toward a small pond where I spent every summer of my life…
{what if hospitality isn’t your gift?}
Every Christmas during my childhood, my mom threw a gigantic party for her friends. She wrote out long lists of chores for my sister and me, although mostly I did them by myself because my sister had a gift for disappearing when it came time to do any housework. (Not that I’m bitter.) We cleaned…
{on love and loss and going home}
Knotted up in my regrets and my losses are the gifts of love and life that I only have because of the regrets and the losses.
To the Brink: a Tribute to Parents
The first eight months of our youngest son’s life epitomized uncertainty to me. I rocked a baby against my chest every night, a solid fragile weight pressed next to my heart, not knowing if I would ever be able to call him “son.” It was the riskiest version of love I’d ever known. As every adoptive parent…