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…
suffering
Parenting, Unpictured
I remember what I was wearing the first time I held each of my children. Not hospital gowns, for my kids didn’t come to me that way. With my oldest, I wore a black blouse with white stitching around the neck and arms. I had a short, angled bob with blonde highlights at the time….
Feel Your Weakness, Feel Your Need
I lay on my left side facing the screen. The sonographer squirted a clear jelly on the wand and rested it near my sternum. Fascinated, I watched images of my heart fill the screen—pumping, beating, opening, closing. This is amazing, I thought, until I felt the familiar flutters and off beats pounding in my chest….
When Hope is a Distant Shore
“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,…
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….
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…
Not Why, But Who
“You don’t get to know why. You just need to trust me.” I cannot count how many times this phrase has left my mouth over the last few weeks. I have a three-year-old, and nearly every question out of his mouth these days is “why?” I only answer my son’s why questions about half the…
When Circumstances Lie, Look for What is True
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…
A Long, Short Walk
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…
He Will Be Strong in Your Weakness
When I took the stage, I was one hundred percent confident in my message. My new boots pinched a bit as I climbed the steps to the piano, but I was certain of the words I would speak, sure that the melodies wrapped around the truth of God’s goodness to us in suffering were the…