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
This piece was written for the January issue of our church newsletter, Grace & Peace. It was on the bright edge of the new year a few winters ago that I set out to read through the entire Bible in 60 days. This meant two months of reading more than 15 chapters per day. I … Continue reading The Feast of Scripture
This piece was written for the December issue of our church's newsletter, Grace & Peace. One day a few years ago, I found myself sitting on the first floor of a doctor’s building, talking to a lady named Darlene. It was a few weeks before Christmas, and rain was blowing against the big windows, wet … Continue reading In the Waiting Room
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
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
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
I remember the way I described the Atlantic Ocean in my letters to Papa Larry from Cape Cod, when we walked the easternmost hem of Race Point Beach with the sea "rising and falling at our sides." But the Pacific, I now realize, does not "rise and fall" like some prim lady curtsying. It cracks … Continue reading Consider the Hummingbirds and the Seas
The cicadas have come, like a thousand sirens in the trees. I was ten last time they emerged from the ground en masse, littering the grass and molting on every tree. I was still wearing my brothers’ basketball shorts and running around sticking the bug shells on peoples’ shirts after church. I remember how we … Continue reading Year of the Locust
Every word of yours proves true. So shore up my sides against it, lash me like water into it, cast me, body and soul, upon it, until a wet wind parts the mists, and I find myself beneath its steady, searching light. “The Scriptures in their own sphere are like God in the universe – … Continue reading Lighthouse
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
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