Beautiful day yesterday. Students hardworking, skies clear, temperature 74 degrees. And then one check-engine light, one large medical bill in the mail, and one lawn mower blowing smoke and dripping black. Cue: deflation. I stopped to recognize that inside me is a central hope that life will get more pleasant and not more difficult. Hope…
“Do you think one coat of paint is going to cover this primer?” he asked a few days ago. In his right hand was a paintbrush. In his left hand was a bucket of white. “I don’t know. Red over white?” I said. Well, it wasn’t officially red. It was Sherwin Williams’ “carriage door” for…
My personal re-telling of Ezekiel 8… He dug into the hole in the wall, as instructed. There he saw a doorway. Opening the door and stepping in, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, he looked and saw pictures on the wall, from floor to ceiling, of all the things she had decided would finally…
I say it to my coffee in the morning, Do something. A small idolatry –hoping to get all strength for living out of 12 ounces of caffeine. God says to his people, “Bring in your idols.” And he demands of these idols, these 12 ounces of god, “Do something.” (Isaiah 41:22, 23 NIV) Except idols don’t…
When my mother-in-law sold her wooded 72 acres in Kila, Montana, one of our tasks was to clean out the garage and pack everything. But the garage had become home to a few pack rats. Bile just rose in my throat. Have you ever experienced pack rats? The huge nests they build out of everything…
It stands above the roofline, the aspen on the north of the house, and it is special because we took it as a sapling from my husband’s childhood home when it was sold. But this spring the leaves came out smaller than those of the adjacent aspen, and now they are brown and dry. The…
Someone may have to shampoo my hair for me today, because I spent a long time bent over in the garden yesterday, weeding rows of potatoes and spinach. My arms and shoulders are sore. Gardening makes Tim Keller’s words, in Counterfeit Gods, more meaningful to me today: When you “pull your emotions up by the roots,”…
Yesterday was the first sunny day after a week of rain, so I put on walking shoes and took a slow, Sunday morning walk around the neighborhood. The wind was blowing a bit, and as I rounded a corner I could hear a flag flapping in the breeze. My eyes were drawn to the American…
I have been reading the Bible through and am nearing the end of the chronicles of the kings. I have whiplash. Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord. Jehoram did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Ahaziah did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Joash did what…
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