Know God. Live Big.
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 who can afford to live… Read More
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 totally gets me. And so… Read More
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 than bread and milk these… Read More
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, oh wait, we’re trying to… Read More
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 who had been caring for… Read More
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 breaking their parents’ hearts. Last… Read More
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 my right. Should have worn… Read More
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 Night. (Aren’t they lovely in… Read More
On Wednesday I woke up at my normal 3:00 a.m. Wrote a blog post. And then stretched out on the couch downstairs to go back to sleep for a few hours, like I do most nights of the week. Except I could not go back to sleep. And on this particular Wednesday I was going to be making the first… Read More
I left the writer’s retreat so that I could teach Spanish on Friday afternoon. With a few minutes to spare, I decided to swing into the church and get a hug from my husband. The parking lot was full, which was weird for a Friday when usually only my husband is there working on his sermon. I wonder what’s going… Read More