How To Not Drag Old Anxiety Into The New Year
It happens every year. It’s like trying to finish off the Christmas cookies, fudge and eggnog so I can start dieting in January. It’s such a burden. But perhaps none quite so marked as th...
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2020
52 articles published this year.
What if My Angel’s Wing is Clipped?
I found it in the bottom of a box marked kitchen in big bold Sharpie script. Moving and packing can throw the best laid organizational plans askew. Not enough space in a box mixes with to...
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How Far Would You Travel if Everything Aligned?
“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw hi...
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I Never Thought of It Like That
It was the usual mayhem of opened plastic totes, lids tossed aside and Christmas decor spilling onto the floor. A just decorated tree and mantel already changed the entire look of the roo...
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My Life Has Not Turned Out the Way I Expected
A year ago, before the shadow of Covid darkened our skies, my daughter wrote a guest post. As we look for the light at the end of the 2020 tunnel, it relates to our lives now even more. T...
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No Thank You
I’ve written before about my hatred for goats, but somehow this year, it seems appropriate to revisit that dislike. No Thank You I hated goats. Dorothy hated being milked. She was an ugly...
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But Why??
“Why?” my grandson asks. A little hand pats my leg, soft but insistent. Round blue eyes search mine as if the connection somehow might supply what he needs to know. Maybe those annoying r...
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Have We Lost Thanksgiving?
Proclamation 118—Thanksgiving Day, 1864 October 20, 1864 Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November...
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Storing Ahead
Our first child cried a lot. Understatement. New mom terror of that piercing cry and the absolute certainty it brought reinforced my insecurity. I had no idea what I was doing. In the rar...
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My Break For The Day
Somewhere between the I-can’t-do-everything-around-here and the it’s-easier-to-do-it-myself syndrome I hear the whisper, “Don’t forget Me.” But the day is full and fragmented. A tiny face...
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How to Build a House that Speaks the Right Things
“For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.” 1 Cor. 3:9 (NIV) “A house tells a lot about the person who lived in it,” my husband, the carpenter mumbled....
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I'm Proud of You Son
“You’re never too old to want your dad to be proud of you,” my husband stated the other night as we both collapsed into bed, tired from a day of hard work. Those poignant words took me im...
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How to Find Peace When You are Unsettled
“So,” she asked, “are you beginning to feel settled yet?” How do I answer that, I wonder? Should I mention we haven’t even carried our furniture up from the basement because first we have...
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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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What to Do When Life is Miserable
“What to do when life is miserable,” I suppose there are those of you out there that don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve never had a miserable day in your life. I will not tell you...
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Cutting Your Husband’s Food and Other Friendly Tasks
So, I cut his roast chicken. Into little square edibles. When I looked up, he wore a puzzled expression, a little worried but seriously amused. I drew my eyes back down to where mangled b...
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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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Kept at Home Faith is Easy to Hide
Her name was Candy. I couldn’t describe her if I had to. I never knew the color of her hair, the width of her smile or touch of her hand. Because she didn’t exist. Yet, every meal time fo...
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Sorting away the Bad, the Good and the Ugly
“Pick me up,” my grandson says. He reaches little arms high, and his mommy leans down, puts her hands against his solid tiny body. Her brown hair swings forward and covers the smile I kno...
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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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Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
“Can’t we all just get along?” she asked. Watery pools gathered at the bottom of her eyes ready to splash over, waterfalls of reflected blue. Life as a thirteen-year-old had become invade...
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Is There a Smile Hiding Under Your Mask?
Like puzzle pieces of an entire, we can only guess what’s behind the mask as we pass in a parking lot, at work, or in a store. But if eyes are indeed the window of the soul, we should be...
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A Perfect Tree and Its Reminder to Be Thankful
This week when I was out walking, I saw a perfect tree. I paused to look up and appreciate the sway in the wind, its colors moving in and out of sunlight, its form and height. Under its o...
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How to Have 2020 Vision in This Strange Time
Every morning I take a walk in the city and pass a spot where I can see a massive field of grain. As I top a hill it’s there. My entire vision fills with gold. Day by day whiter, riper, f...
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I Will Be a Father to You
She sat on my daughter’s bed, bent forward and fumbling with the gadget on her lap, a thin white line connected it to her ear. Even though I stood across the room, I could hear the music...
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So You Want To Be Clean?
A round robin family letter, the kind meant to keep families connected in normal times when coronavirus has nothing to do with being apart pops up in our inbox several times a year. Cousi...
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Whatever Makes Them Happy Isn't the 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 a...
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Who Really Has the Power to Fix It?
I know well my husband’s furrowed brow. I am well acquainted with the set of his jaw and the far away focus of his eyes. His spinning thoughts, the ones that talk louder inside him than s...
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What Does it Mean to be Close?
“Oh mom,” my college aged daughter said, and could it be I heard a tiny bit of impatience in her voice? “Half the kids I know in college live in the same town as their parents and they ar...
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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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God Does Not Social Distance Us
Last night I dreamed I was in a crowd of people in a store. We were pressed together in a small space and I knew I was too close. Too near. I woke up wound tight like a mummy and with a h...
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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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When It's Just Easier To Do It Myself!
“It’s easier to just do it myself,” I mutter. A dishtowel hangs from my hand like a tail swaying against my hip. Chores, those supposedly helpful contributions are about to be my undoing....
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How Do You Want COVID-19 to End?
The long marble hallway stretched like a tunnel ahead. I remember the wavy lines narrowed to another corridor where doctors and nurses passed like a hospital thoroughfare of workers inten...
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How Do You Define Faith in the Coronavirus Pandemic?
Maybe now is actually the right time to doubt your faith. How can I say such a thing in the middle of the biggest global crises most of us have experienced? Why would I bring more uncerta...
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It’s An Odd Time in the Fog of Covid-19
It’s an odd time to sell a house. It’s an odd time to move. It’s an odd time. Boxes scatter the floor and emptiness echoes off the walls of the only house we’ve ever owned. Outside a For...
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Unsettled Times
I don’t know about you, momma, daddy, grandmama, and granddad, but the last few weeks have fogged my brain and tattered my thinking. If today could be superimposed like tracing paper over...
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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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It’s Time to Grow Up
My husband and I stayed in a motel in Nashville two nights before a tornado ripped through the area. We watched the destruction on television and wondered at the fact that we were just th...
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The Panic of Going Below the Waves
What would it have been like to reach a hand to Jesus’ shoulder where he slept and shake him awake? We relate well to the waves of Mark 4 splashing into the boat, the wild winds and terri...
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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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What a Thorn Patch Teaches About Marriage
Anybody who grew up barefoot on a Kansas farm knows about stickers. A flat lying torture-in-waiting plant with seeds like tiny wooden barbs. They spread viciously, looking for tender skin...
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Looking Beyond
After a string of long days, it had culminated into the perfect storm. My two-year-old, four-year-old, and seven-year-old each had the issues of a titanic about to sink. All at the same t...
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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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Even Bathroom Stops are Wonderful in the Eyes of a Child
I heard the truck-stop bathroom door squeak open from my perch inside the painted wooden stall. “Oh Momma!” A little voice said full of wonder. “It’s pink.” Pink was an understatement. It...
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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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Clean Slates of Possibilities or Endless Piles of Heaviness
Sheets of frozen white driven by cutting wind kept my snow-loving son indoors. By late afternoon, the worst moved past. Glittering flecks blew from drift to drift, tiny razor shards of sn...
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If You Aim at Nothing are You Really Bound to Hit It?
In the month of January, when people sit down with year planners and good intentions, I realize, I’m not a great goal setter. I don’t like to see on black and white what I’ve kept locked...
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