Know God. Live Big.
In a grand show of irony, it was the teachers at my school who took the first test this year. A hard one. Thursday was the first day of school. On Friday the computer server went down. But let me take you back to the week before our computer trauma. Teachers gathered, and the superintendent brought us an encouraging word… Read More
Husbands are grown boys, you know, and boys need to find out what makes you crazy and do it. Just to see you be crazy. If I had known this, I never would have let on that I don’t like the claustrophobic feeling of being restrained. But somehow we were sitting on the couch one night, and I may have… Read More
Here’s a great piece of advice for you to tuck away: It is a bad idea to fast and then, in the middle of the fast, decide to start reading the book called Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, by Shauna Niequist. A week ago our senior pastor visited our Saturday evening service and… Read More
There’s a whole bag of Snickers in my drawer, for when you all finish these verb folders, I said. Bribery is awesome. It appears they are going to die when I ask them to write the conjugations of 50 verbs in four tenses. One student has the look of a man about to cross the Sahara. But they don’t know that… Read More
He had planned to go fishing. But while I loaded the dishwasher he poured coffee and said, What are you gonna do today? I said something about working on something. We could go kayaking, he said. I would love to go kayaking. Would you really give up fishing so we could do that? I said. The answer was yes, and… Read More
We spent hours learning about quality assessment, and I thought it was so FUN, which I’m pretty sure is weird. I love being with teachers. When we took breaks and had lunch, do you know what we talked about? Assessment. Meanwhile, during the teacher in-service retreat, we had opportunities to go back to our rooms and rest, which is when I… Read More
I’m picturing him bending over to come out of the crawlspace, suitcase in tow. And his wife is all, What in the world are you doing? We’re moving, Abram says. They move –the whole kit and caboodle. Just because God says. And it’s a little nuts. So there I was… A few Januaries ago when God first whispered women to my… Read More
Six or seven times, she told me. That’s how often she would got up every night to help her mother who has dementia. She said it with a smile, as if it were a privilege and not a burden. Then there was this septic guy yesterday. Well, he wasn’t septic, but he pumps that stuff. When he answered the phone… Read More
After 12 hours of driving from the middle of Wyoming to our home that almost bumps into Canada, we walked in the door to the most horrific grinding motor sound coming from upstairs. I dropped everything in my hands and ran for our bedroom. Our poor little window AC unit sounded like she was about to blow, so I turned… Read More
We thought a lot about wounds last month. A few weeks before my daughter’s wedding, my husband slipped from the bed of his truck and sliced his shin open. It was a deep cut. The doctor said it needed stitches, but because it was filled with mud from the filthy dump he didn’t want to close it up. Ten days… Read More