The Unity of the Brothers
“Brothers!” my youngest grandson shouts. “Hey, Brothers.” And my heart melts just a little. His two older brothers wrestle with each other at the round kitchen table. Laughing, shoving, a...
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Love & Relationships
153 articles gathered under this theme.
Passing Down the Fatherhood Mantel
We’ve sailed past Father’s Day on our calendars. Some, like me, remembered fondly those blood lines that brought physical life. Others tried to forget, and still others celebrated men tha...
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Listening to the Voice of Direction
“You are over the speed limit,” the friendly but slightly mechanical voice says. I smile. She’s my friend, a companion who takes care of a little piece of driving worry. And, I like that...
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What is Our Tower of Babel Today?
When many were saying, “Next thing you know, they’ll be listening to us in our houses,” my dad was carefully picking up the receiver on our wall party line to listen to our neighbors. Eve...
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Unprompted Words From the Heart
“I love you, Grandpa and Grandma,” my twenty-year-old grandson said before he ended our phone conversation. He is about to turn the ripe old age of twenty-one and will be married in less...
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The Day Mom Forgot Me
I’m a mom. I know the tug of the umbilical cord from birth until giving each baby away to love and cherish another. I’m a grandma, and I recognize the family units that must even take pre...
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When Christian Living Fights a Battle With Compromise
“Owwwwwch!” I moaned to no one but anyone who might be so inclined as to listen. Making the bed has its risks. Working from left to right I consistently stub my toes on the hard edge of t...
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Learning to Laugh Again
A notice comes on my phone. A picture of my great-grandson pops up. I open the app and find a video of his mommy talking to him, leaning over his little tummy and digging her head into hi...
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Is Loneliness A Mercy?
“Ain’t no man that good,” I quipped. Everyone feels lonely at times. Truly good friends are rare and precious. I have book friends. Gym friends. Writing friends. Bible study friends. Hobb...
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Do You Love Love?
The ring’s been on my finger over 50 years. When he gave it to me, I was afraid it would slide off and I’d lose it because my finger was so slim, so small. It’s kind of grown onto me now....
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Winter’s Damage Reveals the Soul
Whiter than snow, Lord, whiter than snow. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Wherever you live in the USA, you’ve been aware of the great snow storm. You have likely been part of pr...
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Can We Step Off the Pedestal, Please?
“He hit me first,” little arms cross in defiance, and little legs plant firmly. No retreat without a struggle. These are days grown ups brawl and pick sides, while firmly clinging to thei...
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Clean Slates And New Beginnings
A white board hangs on one of the walls of our basement. On it scribblings mark the agenda of the day, that is, those perceived as most important through the eyes of the last grandchild t...
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Is Your Accent On the Right Thing?
When we moved into a tiny Italian village, we gained immediate notoriety as, The American Family. In fact, we were the only Americans in the area. We were an anomaly. I could feel the ten...
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God Is In the Detour
My friend looked in his rearview mirror and saw the sign to a church, which propelled him to whip his car into an unplanned detour. His life’s trajectory changed that Sunday by his decisi...
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Hold On To Great Treasure
It had been an overlap day, when one commitment led to another with hardly a breath in between. Three grandsons sped through their home kitchen where I tried to do some cleaning up after...
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The Upkeep No One Sees
There is a whole lot of unseen upkeep in life. Changing sheets, mowing lawn, washing laundry, servicing the car, making meals, planning groceries, unplugging drains, buying supplies, fixi...
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What Is Your Calling?
A friend recently phoned me and began our conversation with, “Are you bored now that you are retired?” My four children are in various throes of raising our grandchildren. I watch them an...
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Is This Too Trivial For God?
Sunshine bright with glory bathed our tiny backyard. Blue sky beckoned. Winter months had been long for our four-year-old son, and he was ready for play. “If you need me, I’ll call you,”...
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Are You Really The Best?
I found the crayon-drawn picture lying on a chair, during my hurry-and-pick-up-the-house-cleaning. Time tightened before guests arrived, and the house reflected the chaos of muddy shoes a...
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Have You Been Living A Scammed Life?
A message on my phone encouraged me to contact a certain Margaret. It seems she wants to recruit me for a job. I have great potential to earn an amazing amount of money. In fact, my name...
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Set Apart To Be A Blessing
Pacing from streetlight to streetlight, with my phone pressed hard against my ear, I wore a circled path on the asphalt. My head down, my feet entered the illumined cone shaped area on th...
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Call Me Sis Again
“Hey Sis,” she said to get my attention in the store. She was more than double my age with white hair. She looked like my grandma. “Mom,” I hissed, “don’t call me Sis,” I always wanted a...
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Do You Need Faith Supplements?
I’m not sure how old they were, but to me the title “ancient” applied. My parents, had an entire cabinet of dietary supplements. Every morning they’d pull them out and a ritual began. The...
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Patterns of Life
I am sitting in a waiting room again. Waiting…’cause, that’s what people do in a waiting room. Wondering…which goes with the territory. Worried…it’s part of the package too. It will be a...
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What Are you Steeping In?
My British friend with her lovely accent once said to me, “Americans have been putting tea into the water since the Boston Tea party, and from then on they’ve kept right on doing it the w...
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He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
“Are you being married?" our then four-year-old grandson asked. His whole body shoved forward to fit into a space in-between my husband and myself’s quick hug in the chaos of a kitchen sw...
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What Is Your Heart Carrying Into the Holiday Season?
I love the Holidays. Always have. Hopefully always will. Yet, as seasons pass, new challenges arise and I find at times a sense of melancholy seeps into this time of year. I recognize how...
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Do Autumn Leaves remind you of Life in Christ?
It’s autumn. I’ve gotta admit that I am not a fan of fall. I see the beauty in the Virginia reds, yellows, and oranges. I love the floating leaves in the air. I like the sound of their cr...
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Are You Running Well?
I have some dear friends, whom I love very much even though they run. I mean really run. On purpose. Because they like it. They have a few years up on me, yet they are forever completing...
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Ode to the Nine Foot Tomato Plant
Oh tomato plant that towers many feet above my head. Where is your fruit? I grew up on a farm in Kansas, and at the risk of embarrassing all my Kansas friends and relatives who put into c...
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We The Fickle
The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will. Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart. (Proverbs 21:1 ESV...
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Grandsons, Scooters, and Laying Down the Law
“Put me in jail, put me in jail,” our six year-old grandson shouted. “Put me in jail, Gramma,” The boy’s scooters whizzed by, daring me to move out of the way, challenging me to capture l...
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It’s Our 50th Wedding Anniversary
“He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it.” (1 Thessalonians 5:24 NKJV) 50. The Big 5-0. 5 Decades. A Half Century. As a bride, I had no idea. I thought people who had been marri...
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When God Seems Remote
I was my big brothers’ TV remote. I can still hear their call. Through the bleaching heat waves of Kansas, over the baked and cracked ground, their summons reached me. Underfoot brown far...
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Am I Still Your Favorite Mother?
You were at boarding school and we were six hours from you in our ministry. Our first and oldest to fly from home, you seemed far too young, and we felt so unready. But, the label “Missio...
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Do People See Who You Really Are?
“Is that your son?” I asked pointing to the little guy who had just scored on my grandson’s soccer team. Strangers to one another, we’d been standing side by side echoing with the same gr...
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God Never Needs Updating
“It needs an update,” my husband says. He wasn’t talking about me, which is a good thing. For us both. Phones, computers, thermostats, security systems, clocks, TV's, GPS systems. I mean...
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Numbers, Math, and Green Beans
“Eat the green beans first,” I told my homeschooled grandson. He grinned. He understood immediately what I meant. It really had nothing to do with vegetables, but everything to do with th...
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The Best Kind Of Love
His little fingers dripped with orange greasy pizza oil and stuck together with chocolate fudge-vanilla. I checked his face and found it wreathed with those same streaks of orange and bla...
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We’ve Got Each Other
“Was it Ross?” “No that’s not right,” he shook his head. “Richard?” “Maybe we ought to take some of that stuff they advertise on T.V.,” my husband mused when both of us together couldn’t...
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What does satisfaction look like to you?
“That was so satisfying,” my grandson said. Surprised, I wondered, “Where did that came from?” He had just fished out a slippery shard of thin ice from a puddle. It lay shattered like gla...
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Everlasting Father
“For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given; And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Princ...
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How Old Are You?
“How old are you?” my grandson asks again. It’s a regular question which I try to regularly dodge. “How old do you think I am?” I ask back. His little forehead wrinkles as his eyebrows dr...
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What Offends God?
I don’t often sit around begrudging my past. Shoot, it’s difficult to remember what happened yesterday, but I admit, there are some offenses that are more difficult to forget than others....
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Who Do You Trust?
“Ahh! Salaam and good evening to you, worthy friend. Please, please, come closer,” our tween-aged daughter motioned with her hand. From the movie Aladdin, she knew every word, every gestu...
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Pondering What Are The Chances?
This morning I chanced to look out my bedroom window. Water splashed up from the little “pond” in our back yard, as if a fish slapped its surface. A water feature which worked once upon a...
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Precious Scars Invite Faith
Two favorite features on my nose are little grooves that criss cross the surface. They are barely distinguishable, but I’m proud of them. Both remind me of people I love. One reminds me o...
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The Tipping Point
Life holds a succession of pivotal moments. They distinguish themselves with phrases like, “from now on,” “if I had it to do all over again, “never again,” or “I’ve made my decision.” But...
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What's Beneath It All?
Things were bad, dire in fact. A line which separated life and death grew so slender at times I thought she was already gone. My forehead found a resting spot on my daughter’s still one,...
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Red Hearts, Chocolates, and Five Bible Verses About God’s Love
Growing up my bedroom faced a dirt road. A small gravel circular drive half-mooned just feet in front of my window. I watched the mail man drive up in a cloud of dust. He was as punctual...
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Does God Hear Me?
My blender is revving up with its loud whir when the door bangs open and my grandson runs in from outdoors. He puts on the brakes barely past the threshold, stops, and covers his ears. I...
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This Isn’t What I Asked For!
This past Christmas might have confirmed what we knew all along. Many of the things we want most don’t come wrapped in beautiful packages. While holidays wind down and stores fill with re...
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What Are You Wearing Today?
My husband wakes up every morning and makes a decision. “What class clothing is this day?” What he does during the day determines what he wears. When he used to go into an office, the dec...
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Are Your Eyes on the Right Goal?
Lined up side by side, ready to take off, my grandson’s restraining arm shoots out across his little brother’s stomach. “Go!” Big brother shouts. They take off across our grass. It’s a du...
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Finding Courage and Resolve When a Line In the Sand Demands It
If Humpty Dumpty and I sat down for a heart to heart, I think we’d find we have a lot in common. The first and most obvious is the state of our brokenness. The thing about the king’s hors...
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How Well Do You Know Me?
It’s a routine day at Grandpa and Grandma’s. A brightly colored skyscraper of towering Duplo blocks decorates the middle of the living room. Grandpa has taken time off from his Foot-a-eat...
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When Life Doesn’t Turn Out Like I Think It Should
“Call me Mara,” Naomi said. Tragedy chiseled her face and spilled from her lips. Pleasant, the meaning of her name no longer fit. Mara suited her, for it meant “bitter.” “I went out full...
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Come Aside To a Deserted Place
The first August I lived in Italy, I had no idea what had hit the entire country. Still anemic in language and culture, I didn’t know what to make of the silent streets of Florence, usual...
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True or False: You Only Live Once
“You only live once,” she quipped. Laughter followed that flippant remark. I turned away from the screen. I’ve used those same words to justify indulgences from purchases, to a risk, and...
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What’s in Your Suitcase? - Three Treasures to Pack and Three Attitudes to Leave Behind
Do you go on vacation with more than just what’s in your suitcase? This week you’ll find me at https://www.jeanniewaters.com/blog/. Today it’s my privilege to be Jeannie’s guest blogger....
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Who Knew When We Said “I do?”
My father-in-law used to shake his head and say with a bemused look on his face, “Who knew that someday…,” then he’d finish the sentence with something particular from that season of life...
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Is God Unjust?
This year as Father’s Day approaches I am so aware of the attack on the family, on the role of Fathers, and disengagement and disrespect placed on family in society. It’s complicated by p...
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To Share or Not to Share
Have you ever wondered what to share, how to share or even if you should share something? I have. We see this paradox in Asaph. He authored Psalm 73 with a conflicted heart. He admits to...
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How Good Do You Think God Really Is?
Between believers, a high-five of “God is good,” covers a lot of ground. It is inspired by a happy outcome, good grade at school or maybe a really good deal on a new pair of shoes. How co...
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Growing Up To Be Mom
Little hands on mighty hips, my seven-year-old face-offed with her teacher. The innocent question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” torched the classroom. It seems out of the en...
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What Do You See?
“I no see it,” he says. His little spying eyes are squinted almost shut, focused on finding the far away airplane I point towards in the blue sky. “There,” I say to my three-year-old gran...
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Can Someone Like That Ever Change?
The talk was fierce. Fear rampant. He had orchestrated one murder, and was bent on more. Mobs and riots cheered the violence he inspired. It was unthinkable someone like that could ever c...
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Hidden Temper, Undeserved Grace
“Thar’ she blows,” a friend quipped of his late wife. A sweet soul and my dear friend, she apparently hid a temper under her skin, not easily aroused but impressive to its recipients. He...
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We Found the Wild Life
“Is there wildlife?” she asked over the phone. After moving from the midwest where deer and antelope play and seldom is heard a discouraging word, I paused just a moment to consider. Well...
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Where’s The Free Lunch?
“TANSTAAFL,” the text read. That crazy duck quack my husband has on his phone announcing incoming texts sometimes drives me crazy. At almost 1:00 a.m., it’s enough for a heart attack. “Wh...
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What’s Your Power Source for the Storms of Life?
“We are ill prepared for living here,” I told my husband on the third day of a power outage. He’d been shoveling the driveway, bringing wood into the fireplace and fire burning stove, and...
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What Are Your gods of 2022?
“And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place.”...
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Thanksgiving Transforms Hearts
As we enter the season of thanksgiving, I love the emphasis on remembering, being aware of the little things, the falling leaves, slivers of sunshine and raindrops of life. We talk of the...
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How To Know Right from Wrong
We went to Italy back in our young days knowing my husband might have an advantage in language and culture. He grew up as a missionary kid in Ecuador. I grew up a farmer’s kid in Kansas....
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The Prayer Stump
My husband chiseled out what he calls a prayer stump from the trunk of a fallen tree. Its back behind our house where he is hidden from human eyes. It’s an uncomfortable seat, an earthly...
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Do You Like Me?
“Do you like me?” the elder three-year-old asked his little brother. He rolled onto his side and hugged the little body of his two-year-old brother lying beside him. In a world of Faceboo...
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If a Tree Falls in a Forest?
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" I’ve not lived a long time in Virginia, but in the time I have, I’ve seen a lot of trees. Coming from...
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Hope for the Worrier
Recently I wrote a requested article on the subject of worry. It caused me no end of worry. Worry is my middle name. I’ve been put to the test in a crazy worrisome situation in the last f...
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We Remember Needed Words At The Right Time
“Remember what I told you,” I said to my little girl with golden hair, long and silky. She tilted her chin upward, her blue eyes fringed in black lashes locked into mine, digging deep, sh...
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Who is in Control Of Generations?
“He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children,” Ps. 78:5 ESV “Who’s in control here?” I asked the mirror mi...
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Do You Really Wanna Be Full?
“I wanna be full,” my grandson says. Tomato red rims his mouth, like the ring around a bullseye. Sauce lies draped down the front of his green shirt. A whole lotta food didn’t hit the mar...
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What My MisMatched Shoes Taught Me About God
I wore mismatched shoes to the Doctor today. It’s taken us a year with the COVID backup and restrictions to establish a base doctor in our new town. I finally had my first visit after mon...
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When Heads Come Together
Two heads are better than one the saying goes, but besides the obvious intellectual melding of minds, a much sweeter truth is communicated when two heads come together. A mommy rests her...
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Recognizing You on Father’s Day Even Though Your Hair Is Gray
“I didn’t recognize that gray haired man,” my husband and I squinted together at the photo on his camera’s screen. I saw him immediately in the group picture. He wasn’t so ready to claim...
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Little Boys, Escape Artists and Cunning Hearts
We have an escape artist in our family. The kind that scales double safety gates across the stairway, the type who climbs out a crib in a sleep sack, through open windows and sneaks out l...
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When Mom Forgot Me
“Where do you live?” she asked. Wind whipped her white curls into a crown around her head against a blur of golden wheat fields as we sailed along the dirt road. I glanced her way. She sa...
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Birds, Brains and Semi-Retirement
Our yard is full of psychologically needy birds, and my husband is the reason. For those of you who know this man that God gave me, you must realize he will not grow old like the rest of...
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Should the Church Put Up With It?
Do you know where the term “green with envy” stems from? Shakespeare is credited with the English idiom in Othello. Before he came along to make it popular, the Greeks are thought to have...
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Do You Know Gawd?
“Do you know Gawd?” Arched back, hands on hips, lips puckered, the question comes from knee high, completely out of the blue. I look down at his upturned face. A light saber pulsates in h...
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How to Combine Sincerity, Love and Others
My acquisition of the Italian language really doesn’t reflect the amazing teacher I had in Florence, Italy, or the excellence of her skills. Like Michaelangelo she chipped away, always co...
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We Were So Alike Until We Got Married
(This post may have a familiar ring to it. You may have read it on the first go around Feb. 14, 2017, but it’s especially appropriate for a revisit before Valentine’s Day sneaks up on you...
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Do You Know How to Define Your Terms?
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” -Bill Clinton. Every time my husband and I round a particular corner, political signs crop into our sight like spring tulips. The law...
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Do You Want to Change Course?
“…my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped.” Ps. 73:2 (ESV) I feel like a lot of us are walking into a log across our path, or maybe on quick sand. The Psalmist Asaph writ...
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Don't Touch
“Uh, uh, uh,” I hear the warning in three short grunts. I turn quickly to find out what my not-quite-two-year-old grandson is doing. My quickness is due first to fear for his safety and s...
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Has Anything of True Value Changed?
“Nothing of value has changed,” he said leaning over our daughter. His young face was earnest and sincere. His blue eyes searched to connect with hers, foggy and distant. Day after day an...
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Make Sure You Accent the Right Thing
It was a tiny village, not much more than an intersection with a few stores. When we moved into the area, the only American family in Magazzino, Italy, we gained immediate notoriety. I co...
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Reacting to Authority
A finge of black lashes, thick and long shadow his blue eyes. They only partially hide his hurt and uncertainty. They tug at my heart like a messy knotted umbilical cord. “…For the Lord…”...
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Is God Absent When He is Silent?
Our middle daughter was about the sneakiest two-year-old imaginable. Quiet, sweet and oh so cunning. But the one sneak I never got used to was the tip-toe out of bed escape. Because she d...
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Home Is A Lot More Than What Fits In A Truck
There’s a U-haul behind us. I will be home someday, and when I am, the U-haul’s not coming. We’ve been planning this move for a long time, still I feel like it snuck up on me. The details...
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How to be Ready Before it Takes Place
Sometimes I just want to see to the other side before I get there. I confess to reading the last page of a book to calm my nerves in the middle, or wanting to know the end of a movie befo...
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Walk With The Wise
“She’s my friend,” my daughter said with a nod. “She doesn’t cheat.” My head shot up. “And some of your friends do?” I asked, thinking at least my six-year-old was on the right side of th...
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Five Lessons from Momma
1. What you criticize in others, you likely do yourself. Momma took the lesson a step farther. What you criticize in others you probably are aware of because it’s something you already do...
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But What if God Doesn’t Do What I Ask?
How is your, “But even if He does not” faith? My husband, Phil, and I have been reading some of those New Testament verses that beg childlike faith. Verses like, “if you ask me anything i...
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Follow the Rules for Goodness Sake
“No, no, no,” he said. He held his little hand like a stop sign. His voice raised a breathy octave. “Let’s not play it like that, let’s say if you want to move ahead on red, you can.” He...
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Love, Social Media and Noise
In the love month, my challenge to you is to read what is called the love chapter in the Bible. 1 Corinthians 13 always convicts me of straying tentacles of my heart strings, and is alway...
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Life Will Never Be The Same
The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. Proverbs 16:1 (ESV) “Life will never be the same,” I told my friend. “No matter how this turns out, li...
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All for Jesus. Sorta. Kinda. Well Almost.
Here they come again. Younger each year, or maybe I’m just older. They come with their finger on a map and feet pointed forward, eager to go anywhere and do anything for Jesus. Men and wo...
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How to Kill a Thankful Heart
I did it again. I took out my measuring tape and measured. It wasn’t the dainty kind I carry in my purse and embarrass my husband with, or the big black one pocketed in his tool belt hang...
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I Want to Hold You Too
“I want to hold you,” he begged at his mommy’s knee, arms upraised toward her, little toes tipped his almost two-year-old body up and down expectantly. “I want to hold you too,” she said....
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He Gave Himself Up for Another
Before the carpenter’s sawdust brushed off, before the wood glue dried, before the grout hardened, the guy I married had to learn a new skill, the pregnant husband trade. Married four sho...
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BC and AD of Charity
I tend to separate my life into BC (before Charity's illness) and AD (After the Destruction) of Charity's physical body. Those categories can also stand for Before Children and After Daug...
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Till Kids Do Us Part
Okay, so it’s possible I don’t like her child. That friend who’s been a friend for as long as I can remember, the one who dried my tears after break ups and sad movies, the friend who kne...
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How One Honest Admission invited a Myriad of Support
“So far so good,” I text to a friend when asked how my husband is doing after surgery. The crazy thing is he may be doing ok, but, I am so far from so good. It is a terrifying ride for me...
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Each Day Is An Offering
You rode the rapids from the protection of my womb into the hands of a stranger. With that final push, our hello began but giving up started. Because each day is an offering. We separated...
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Those Detours on my Street
I have a friend who looked in his rear view mirror and saw the sign to a church, which propelled him to whip his car into into an unplanned detour. It altered his entire life. His traject...
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Call Me Mara
“Call me Mara,” Naomi said. Tragedy chiseled her face and spilled from her lips. Pleasant, the meaning of her name no longer fit. Mara, suited her, for it meant “bitter.” “I went out full...
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When Mom called me "Sis"
“Hey Sis,” she said to get my attention in the store. She was more than double my age with white hair. She looked like my grandma. “Mom,” I hissed, “don’t call me Sis,” I always wanted a...
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Whatever Makes My Child Happy is Not the Right Answer
“The things I do for my kids,” I thought with a half eaten Big Mac in one gloved hand, and piece of wilted lettuce in the other. “But this tops them all.” I stood on a stool leaning into...
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Loving My Heroes
“Hi Beautiful,” he says from the doorway of her hospital room. He is slightly out of breath from hurrying, from untangling little arms squeezed around his neck, and giving the baby a bott...
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With 936 Weeks To Raise Our Kids, Maybe Parenting Isn’t About The Big Things
We were three weeks into a month-long road trip with our three young boys. And although we are no strangers to roadtripping with young children, I was feeling rather tired, overwhelmed, a...
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The Father That Loves Me
A fistful of trousers yanks in my grandson’s little hand. “Dadda,” he urges. His little face is upturned. Longing and hope fix his expression. My grandson expects response. After all, thi...
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Stepping Forward With God
I’ve never been one to jump with two feet into a new year. I don’t even take giant steps boldly into the future. Let me tip toe into it with baby steps, slightly fearful and hopeful not t...
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The No. 1 Way to Resolve Your Insecurities
Sometimes I’m Leah and sometimes I’m Rachel. Sometimes I soar confidently, secure in my position and exhilarated by life. Sometimes I sink in a mire of insecurity and doubt. Sometimes I f...
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4 Days to Christmas: VINE
I used to stuff little arms into sleeves like a turkey at Thanksgiving. But somewhere between the years of babies and grand babies, the art went south. I’m all thumbs, trying to capture s...
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8 Days to Christmas: RULER-Shepherd
“For out of you (Bethlehem) shall come a Ruler who will shepherd My people Israel.” Matt. 2:6; NKJV. I love the idea of ruler-shepherd. It’s almost an oxymoron, two impossibles joined tog...
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10 Days to Christmas: OMEGA
“I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the End,” says the Lord. Jesus had a birthday. Just like us, from the day He drew His first breath, time moved toward His death. Alpha and...
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13 Days to Christmas: LIGHT
Christmas lights are evil, my friend wrote on a facebook post. I know what she means. Tangled strands that don’t light are irritating. But the original Christmas lights were a different s...
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23 Days to Christmas: Bread of Life
Flour whitens the front of my shirt like snow. I brush at it fruitlessly with a hand sticky with wrinkled bits of dough like hanging chads. My counter space, with its strict no fly-zone i...
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Unconditional Finds Its Way Through a Child
Ps 78:5-7 “…That they should make them known to their children; That the generation to come might know them, The children who would be born, That they may arise and declare them to their...
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When Blame Hits the Fan
It hits my life again. That inevitable desire to connect my circumstances with the actions of another and search for blame. “That woman you gave me,” Adam complained when confronted with...
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Are You a Good Lover?
I’m not a good lover. Let me pause before you think I just handed you more information than you care to receive, like a bad Facebook post. Here is what I mean: I don’t know how to love li...
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Redefine Your Roses
We are celebrating forty-three years of marriage. All you math people stop it. Just stop. It is a long time, that’s the point. I have spent forty-three years trying to figure out that “ma...
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Generations: God's Legacy
The car doors slam, and we slide into opposite sides. We look at one another, then sit silently and think over the last hour. The question comes again: “Will we be like that?” As our car...
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In the In-Between
In the In-Between I sat on the cold window ledge and leaned my forehead against the glass, looking out at the hospital garden. Brown earth, dried and brittle, had replaced the green of mo...
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Shelf Life
For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. I woke up this morning and felt like I’d lasted longer than my shelf life. I’m tired, weary and it is the just the first month of a...
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Strength Clothed
We met in the living room. Two couples. Older and younger. Married and about-to-be. My husband and I, the older and married pair, sat on stuffed tweed chairs across the coffee table from...
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I Hear Knocking
After a weird night of outside noises, my foggy early morning Bible reading arrives at Revelation 3:20. The familiarity of its long ago memorized words steal into my heart immediately lik...
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Are You Listening?
Hot tiny hands warm both sides of my cheeks, smooth and just a little bit forceful. They pull my face upward from where I sit engrossed in my screen so our eyes are even. Hers, translucen...
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Paralytically Speaking
If people would ask me how I feel about the event of my daughter’s paralyzation nine years ago, I might want to say a lot of things. One is that it makes me sad in waves of sorrow. Period...
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Put It On Pause
My family drives one another crazy with the pause button on the TV remote. We pause to go to the bathroom, we pause to get something to eat, and we pause because someone didn't catch on a...
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True love cares for the soul
My dad sang like Pavarotti, my mom accompanied him as if she could read his heart. Because they were so talented, we sang. A lot. Evenings we often gathered around the piano and harmonize...
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Pink and Blue
Ephesians 5:33 (ESV) However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. As Pastoral care workers for our mission agency, my husband...
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Don't Blink
To my dear daughters and daughter-in-law, who are doing a priceless job of being mommies who love Jesus and train my grandchildren to love Him as well. People say it will all be done in a...
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Heading the right direction
Squiggled blue and red lines crisscross between Kansas City and our destination. The map divides my screen into roads and rivers. I know where I’m headed, but I don’t know the route. This...
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Good Hate
“What did Dad give you that for?” my son asked when I pulled out a bright yellow circular sander from a beautifully wrapped box. “I asked for it!” Bewilderment drew his brows together int...
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The Big Red Elephant in the Room
“It’s not gonna turn out good for you,” Phil tells the young man and his lovely wife sitting close together on our couch. Their lives are about to tumble like clothes in a dryer. Packing...
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Take the Crown
“Remind me again of why I love football,” I moaned. My gut sank while I watched another win slip into defeat. I felt like a deflated balloon. Not just for minutes, but for hours, even day...
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Erasing the evidence
I catch her busy little body as it flies by on thin legs and swing her onto my lap. She is the granddaughter of flaxen fairies, fair skin and fierce drama. Her legs pump air like a windmi...
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Mom's Legacy
On the farm, after dark meant black. Light shone from a tall pole smack in the middle of the yard. A sphere of brightness left edges beyond with shadows that bent and swayed. The big grey...
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It is root canal morning. I hate root canals. I’ve got teeth that crumble like coffee cake, fortunately, my dentist is pretty good. I climb into the dental chair and the hygienist recline...
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He Knows
Recently I talked to a friend armed with a list of bitter accusations. She began what soon became a blame saga with the words, “You’ll never know…” Since that conversation those words hav...
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Work Like Martha - Love Like Mary
I am overwhelmed. Too much to do, too many relationships, and too little time. Did Martha feel like this when Jesus told her that Mary had chosen the better part? “Martha was distracted w...
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