A Story of Christmas Past My grandma Karen watched Hallmark Christmas movies the way some people use an Advent wall calendar. She counted down to Christmas that way, settling into the couch every evening for the newest feature with the same cookie-cutter plotline as the night before---and she wanted us to relish them too. At … Continue reading All Shall Be Well
My friend who shares my name, Bethany Rose, called me last Tuesday morning from somewhere up in Minnesota, where she was bundled and walking her Great Pyrenees named Shiloh. “We’re experiencing a warm front,” she said. “It’s twenty-five degrees today.” I was planting a tray of lettuce on my patio in Missouri, because we were … Continue reading The Long Winter
By Hannah Mead “I am coming,” He whispers, with cypress smoke and cinnamon. I’m waiting, straw clutched between cold fingers pushed through impatient pockets. But tonight, the promise of dawn lingers heavy below the horizon. Perhaps Venus is pinned like a diamond in the darkness behind the shed that tilts, weary, at the bottom of … Continue reading Advent
By Joel Melton … and we wait. we know the end, how the promise was kept, and is being kept. He has and is and will come. the advented Light still breaks -- is adventing -- in our night-like days. we wait like winter. the curse is being reversed. redemption’s cycle spins in the song … Continue reading …
By Rachel S. Donahue We once traveled by nightin a country far awaywhere the lights of men were few and far between.In the midst of that great darkness,a tiny spot of lightblinked hope for miles, could easily be seen. When wrapped in a cloak of darkness,small lights shine brighter still,their brilliance heightened by the lack … Continue reading Magi, Martyrs, and Messengers
By Esther Hartman and sometimes, sometimes, the shadow is married to the lightin a grand ceremony of temple curtains torn in two,and the welding of spark to suffering, of hideous to holy,and light keeps replacing bulbs in all dark’s hiding placeshoping he’ll finally see himselfand the great rivals called death and lifefind each other ravaged … Continue reading The Great Opposites
Read: 1 Corinthians 13:4 & Galatians 4:4-5 I read Wendell Berry novels to learn that life is long and work is slow. Hannah Coulter is Nathan and Hannah’s long, slow story of love. But what is a “love story,” really? Is it when people "fall" and didn't see it coming? Is it what Hallmark says … Continue reading Love as the Work of Years
December 13 Read: Luke 2:8-11 & John 16:20-22 I was still deciding what I could give up for Lent last winter when God chose for me— for all of us. He took my sister’s unborn baby after just ten days inside her. Leanna miscarried on Ash Wednesday, but we’ve gone without that little one for … Continue reading The Shadows Before Sunrise
Read: Matthew 10:34-36 & Luke 2:13-14 At the end of a year marked by war, when people have swung swords at each other, I've discovered something (surprising) about division in Scripture: It isn't a political party or mask mandate that ultimately divides people. It’s Jesus and his salvation. “Do not think I have come to … Continue reading Jesus With A Sword
Read: Isaiah 9:2 & Luke 12:35-48 I stood partly in the rain at dusk tonight, a candle cradled in one hand, my phone in the other. The sky was cold and against it, the fire let off a Narnian glow. I snapped a few pictures but seconds later, a wind gust and raindrop snuffed out … Continue reading Hope is Not a Candle
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