When I was six years old, my dad took me to visit a man in the hospital whose name was Kirk. Kirk was one of Dad’s closest friends. They had a Paul and Timothy kind of brotherhood, where Kirk had broken free from a stormy past and become one of Dad's greatest mentors in the … Continue reading Visiting Kirk
Last night, my niece, Elsie, showed me a picture of what her new baby brother or sister might look like in the womb. It is just nine weeks tiny, with black eyes and hands and feet poking their way outward. “The baby is the size of an olive,” Elsie said. I tried to imagine holding … Continue reading The Size of an Olive
Before the sun slipped down on the Sabbath, Mary might have pressed aloe leaves and squeezed their gum into a dish, mixing it with myrrh and water. Carrying it to a buried Jesus at dawn must have felt like a last, little fragrant offering. But when she saw the sunrise streaming into an open tomb, … Continue reading Leaves of Healing
I watched one afternoon in October to see my neighbor’s chainsaw whir and whine and whistle clean through the trunk of his tree, and I felt the wrongness of it, as he stood on a ladder to dismantle it limb-by-limb. “I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in … Continue reading Upon the Death of a Bradford Pear
My pastor said last Sunday that it's no mistake where we meet Jesus. I met him at the kitchen table, when I was still small enough to fit on my dad's lap. He had unlatched and pulled the two halves of the table apart, so there was a gap where the leaves might go. On … Continue reading At the Kitchen Table
We read Miss Twiggley’s Tree so many times that both covers tore off, including the final page of the book, which offered the moral of the story. But the last page I had was enough. It pictured the inside of Miss Twiggley’s house, tucked deep in the boughs of a willow tree, where the entire … Continue reading A Set Table in a Safe Tree
A New Creation Poem Remember that at one time you were a howling wilderness, the haunt of hyenas who cackled among the thistles under a ghost moon. But now in Christ Jesus you are a fresh spring, cooling the rocks and watering the hills that roll under a young sun.
In learning how to sew, it has often occurred to me that most of my time is spent tearing things out. Maybe it’s because I’m a new and fumbling seamstress, but I spend more energy ripping out what’s crooked or backward than actually sewing pieces together. The other day, I talked to a seamstress friend … Continue reading To Tear the Seam
I read the Cape Cod Times during breakfast Monday morning, and the story was about a man who got swallowed by a humpback whale on June 11, 2021. He was lobster diving off Herring Cove Beach at 8 A.M. when something like a freight train hammered him and everything went black. He felt himself surging … Continue reading Lord of the Seas
A Story of Christmas Yet To Come Race Point is the easternmost I’ve ever been— in fact, it’s just about as eastward as you can get in the States, at the fingertip of Massachusetts’s arm. It was a strange thing to stand with all North America behind me, to face the horizon of sea, to … Continue reading Look East
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