It was the fall of 1983, when computers were still a twinkle in their mother’s eye. I was a freshman sitting in typing class, and it was my first experience putting my fingers on what we now call a keyboard. Every day we did drills: left fourth finger up to the W. Right fourth finger…
Sometimes I think I should rename my website, “Anxiety Girl.” Here I am again today, with my latest installment about worrying and what has been helping me overcome this lately. Let’s start with the worries and how real they are: Money and old cars and old houses and old bodies. Grown kids. Kids needing jobs….
A student raised his hand and asked me a fair question yesterday. He wanted to know when I was going to teach a certain set of vocabulary. I explained to him that I don’t teach that until the third year. No big deal, except the encounter was a crocodile death roll to my sense of…
My prayer list right now feels unbearable. So many in my circle have serious health issues and then the cha-ching, cha-ching of expenses that snake around each diagnosis. My heart! What I want to do is reach for my checkbook and say, “Here, at least let me pay for all of it for you.” Except,…
“Wednesday Hump Day,” I said to him last night before we went to sleep. He’ll go up to Glacier Bible College and be Professor Fitzwater again today, teaching students this week about the life of Christ. I’ll go stand in front of high school students and teach them sentences in Spanish about the gospel. We…
It was the end of another full day of school, and I was doing my normal self-evaluation on the drive home. It’s like taking attendance, except my question is “Are you okay?” instead of “Are you here?” I see each student and replay and critique each conversation. Did I hurt any feelings? Say or do…
The fridge in our rental went out, you know, so we walked the aisles in Lowe’s to look at replacements. The property manager made it clear that we only had an obligation, as landlords, to replace the fridge. It didn’t have to be new, and it didn’t have to be fancy. There were fridges for…
Here’s the scenario: We have company in town. They’ve sold their house and need to buy a new house immediately, so they’re putting in some long days with a realtor. “Let me make dinner for us tonight!” I said. At 3:00 I put on my apron, ready to enjoy the slow process of preparing vegetables…
I’m a layer-outer. When I was going to Uganda over a decade ago, I started packing two months in advance. The guest room was empty, so I set up my suitcase in there and started making neat piles of travel supplies. Every day for weeks I stood in the guest room, thought through my list,…
He was my younger brother, and then one day he was my hero. Mom was suddenly alone five years ago when dad passed away on a snowmobile in Wyoming. I couldn’t breathe in the night thinking about it. We lived 12 hours away, and phone calls every week seemed empty in the face of so…
I’ve been a little teary over the last few weeks. Mom and I were talking about it, as we come up on the fifth anniversary of my dad going to be with Jesus. “It’s not the anniversary that’s getting to me,” I said to her. “It’s what I see happening in my own life.” My…
Way back in the day, I was our church pianist, and my husband sang in the choir. That left our two grade school-aged children alone on the front row during the music time every Sunday. This was slightly terrifying. The piano I played was a shiny black upright, which offered a perfect reflection of the…
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