Dear Maggie, Thank you for your last letter. I read it on my walk back from the mailbox and my heart broke with yours. I am so sorry to hear about your friend, Lydia. It’s a sad, strange thing when an individual who made the good confession of faith and walked with other believers in … Continue reading When a Friend Walks Away
This article was written for the August issue of the Lee Creek Baptist Church newsletter, Grace & Peace. Since my miscarriage last summer, I’ve found myself having conversations of a similar shape with fellow sisters in Christ who are grieving or suffering a bitter loss. There are plenty of difficult things in the days following, … Continue reading A Song of Praise to Our God
I sowed a seed in doubtthat it could ever bloom---can a California poppy weatheran Arkansas high noon? I tended it with the resteach morning during spring,telling my hands in faith to worktoward a beauty I could not see. Midsummer came in jewels,the myrtles finely dressed,just as they were a summer beforewhen we laid our baby … Continue reading Where the Poppy Blooms
The other day, I visited with a friend on the phone for an hour while I folded laundry and she fed lunch to her kiddos. There was a lot of background noise. There were pauses to shush a child or to keep them from pulling a chair down on themselves. As I folded napkins and … Continue reading Pick Up the Broom
I used to go to church with a lady who got teary-eyed on September 11th, remembering how her husband could have easily flown as a pilot for United that day in 2001. As the Lord would have it, her husband wasn't working that morning, but Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania was a plane … Continue reading Where Were You?
"O dear friend, when thy grief presses thee to the very dust, worship there!" ~ Charles Spurgeon The story of August: Fans running throughout the house and strawberry lemonade on days of 100 degrees Summer marigolds in the garden On a day of hospital visits---Christians who stand firm in the surgery waiting room, quoting James, … Continue reading Sorrow, Psalm 139, & the Good Shepherd
This tribute was written for my grandma Naomi's memorial service. She entered Christ's presence Sunday morning, August 17th. My grandma Naomi was a lover of the little things. Looking out her and Papa’s sunroom windows this time of year---when the cicadas are full in the trees, the fish flipping down in the pond, and August … Continue reading With These She Was Content
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
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
“I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in the wind, the sound of a chainsaw and that of a much heavier engine.” - Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow I watched one afternoon in October to see my neighbor’s chainsaw whir and whine and whistle clean through the trunk of … Continue reading Upon the Death of a Bradford Pear
