I have not set my pencil to scratch on paper for a very long time. Traveling through something hard for a few years has required different work of these fingers: gripping the rail of the path with white knuckles. I walk forward in dark fog, slowly and cautiously moving one foot forward at a time….
The mirror tells the story of what the last months have been like for me. Black circles under my eyes speak of little sleep and great strain and sorrow. Blog post after blog post about suffering, with seemingly no end to that cloudy theme. This morning I woke up and fought the familiar battle to…
Only a week into this new year, and we’re already facing hard circumstances. The news of turmoil and the ongoing Covid crisis creates a sandwich, with our own personal problems in the middle. Turning the calendar page did not change the fact that we live in a broken world. At my normal 3:00 a.m. lie-awake-and-worry-about-everything…
My squirmy, eight-month-old grandson was playing in my lap while his momma was taking a much-needed rest. I had my Bible open next to me and was attempting to memorize the passage of Scripture that was my devotional reading for the day. (Side note: kudos to moms with littles who make any attempt to reach…
We live in a high-end neighborhood in our town. This is the place where you want to go to garage sales and take your kids trick-or-treating, because you know you’re going to get good stuff. We live with my mother-in-law and her sister, and I’m always thinking to myself, We’re not the kind of people…
It was better than Hallmark, when Matt and I left the Global Leadership Summit in August and he looked at me and said, “Part of our conference experience needs to be that we each go home and order one of the books that was mentioned by a speaker and that sounds intriguing.” I swooned. He…
Saturday is always grocery day. In the morning, I go to the pantry with my cell phone and start filling in my three Google Keep lists with what we need from Costco, the grocery store, and the department store. Then I go out to the garage, where we keep paper products (a more valuable commodity…
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,…
Last week I sent you a blog post one morning about suffering. That evening I got a shocking call that my aunt had gone into the hospital with stomach pain and would be coming out with a grim diagnosis of stage IV cancer. The next morning I had a short text from my close friend…
When I stretch out my arms and turn a full circle, almost everyone brushed by my fingertips is in the middle of staggering hardship right now. I hardly know a single family untouched by life-altering medical diagnoses, and then there are those with immense financial strain, marriages for which we’re holding our breath, and kids…
It’s freezing out here. I’m sitting in my car, in front of the high school, with some time to kill before I accompany the next round of vocalists for festival practice. Cars are driving by covered in a few inches of white, and I can see the snow clouds pressing down on the mountains to…
Dad told me about 50 times that I’d better watch out, because one day that brother of mine would be bigger than me and able to lay me low. Whatever, I said. Of course, dad didn’t know that a few decades later I would find myself crying my way through the Celtic Woman’s Oh, Holy…
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