This piece was written for the February issue of our church newsletter, Grace & Peace. Each year, I get a little better at remembering to plant bulbs. I wait until the garden has fallen asleep and the late chrysanthemums have stopped blooming, those first few frosts biting at their heads and turning them gray. One … Continue reading Bear Fruit With Patience
It was my parents’ idea to drop me off for the day at Mrs. Rosalie’s duplex in town. I wanted to learn how to sew a pair of palazzo pants, and Mrs. Rosalie had worked as a seamstress most of her life. Instead of plopping me in front of a YouTube video, my dad dropped … Continue reading Mrs. Rosalie
This piece was written for our church's November newsletter, Grace & Peace. When I was a little girl, I remember something Corrie ten Boom said that stayed with me: "When people come up and give me a compliment... I take each remark as if it were a flower. At the end of the day I … Continue reading A Bouquet of Thanks
Dear Maggie,* Once when I was a teenager, I went to a big concert by a Christian band-–the kind of concert where you feel the drums beat under your ribcage. The event was themed around one of the band’s new songs, which dealt with the worth of a young woman who doesn’t see herself as … Continue reading On Goldenrod & Body Image
One day a few years ago, I stood on the porch of a lady who'd just had surgery. I had both arms wrapped under a brown Aldi bag with jars of soup and a loaf of bread inside, and I was feeling rather small. As the lady's son took the paper bag and I warned … Continue reading Store Bought Hospitality
Books are a love language, and one of the ways Jared demonstrated his love for me early on was by lending me his pastoral library. I love books, Jared loves books (he has more than I do), and he’s always been generous with them. I’d come home from my visits to Arkansas with commentaries and … Continue reading Two Little Tributes
My good friends lost their mom and grandma back in December. We are such good friends, in fact, that I'd only ever called her "Nana." Nana was known for her knitting and quilting, so at her memorial, her family hung her quilts in their kitchen for folks to look at. They filled a basket with … Continue reading She Knitted Things
After dinner last night, I came across a journal entry I wrote on October 20th of last year. Today was the Lord’s Day, it began—one of many that I have spent at Jared’s church. On that particular Sunday in autumn, we had read a Psalm on the drive to church; he’d set the thermostats while … Continue reading There and Back Again
On the week we were engaged, Jared and I were grocery shopping together when he got a text that nearly took the wind out of him. It was from a fellow pastor, asking if he'd heard the news: a preacher they both greatly respected, a stalwart leader and renowned expositor, had fallen to immorality. Overnight, … Continue reading Upon the Fall of a Pastor
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of a woman named Mrs. Almira Todd, who lived in a clapboard house on the coast of Maine---a gardener and a landlady and "an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame." They grew out from her gray-shingled walls and up her steep gables, … Continue reading Scent on a Spring Breeze
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