Open Letter to the Man Who Holds My Hand in the Dark
Dear Man of Mine, A couple of months ago when we were at a friend’s wedding, I stood in the fellowship hall before the ceremony wrapping the stem of the bride’s bouquet with a white ribbon, silk over thorns, and I thought. I thought about the day sixteen years ago when we stood, bare toes on rough carpet in a plain little sanctuary, and you held my hands as we made promises for better or worse. Someone had put red glitter in the foot washing water, and the pictures took so long that all the food was gone by the time we made it to the reception, and it didn’t matter one bit because I had you and you had me. And a couple weeks later we sat in the car by a pond and talked about all the things we didn’t know yet. And it’s true. We didn’t know what was coming. But you...
Read MoreThe Broken Body
A few weeks ago I went through some testing for several autoimmune disorders. The tests eventually came back normal, but while I was waiting for the results, I started hearing story after story from people who were living with everything from lupus to rheumatoid arthritis. When a body starts to attack itself, it’s not a pretty thing. Something that’s supposed to function as a unit starts to have all kinds of issues when it turns its weapons inward. We Jesus followers are intimately familiar with the ugliness of internal conflict. We’re all a bunch of humans, with a tendency to act really human-y. We limp ungracefully along, looking more like the Bride of Frankenstein than the Bride of Christ. The Church, the Body of Christ, is a giant, complicated mess, with as...
Read MoreGetting Unstuck
My friend Trudie just got a huge double stroller. Like the kind that might take up the majority of an elevator. Which is exactly what happened a couple weeks ago at a local science museum. My husband and two girls got in first, followed by Trudie’s three-year-old, and then Trudie with her baby and stroller. (Did I mention this thing is giant?) The young maintenance man in the corner pressed himself into the wall and stared as I tried to squeeze myself past the stroller’s handle into the one empty square foot of space beside Trudie. I tried. And failed. As the handle pressed into my rib cage, the elevator doors closed on my undignified hind end. Over and over. By the time I managed to turn the stroller just enough to let me in, my friend and husband were laughing...
Read MoreLet It Be
Some things don’t settle in until you see it in somebody else’s eyes. Especially when they’ve known you forever and they can see the change. I stood on a hillside graveyard in Kentucky last weekend, bare toes in deep moss, and looked sixty or so of my family in the eyes. There was no pretending – not for them, not for me. It’s been a hard couple of years. There are more fresh graves on that hillside than seems right, and that’s just the upturned soil we can see. Almost all of us are working a little harder this year to fill our raw lungs, and there aren’t many of us that aren’t asking why. Why are there seasons like this? What’s the point of grief and cancer and heartache and aging and broken relationships and dreams that disappear like smoke in the wind? A...
Read MoreThe Light at the Bend
Our road just bent in a way we didn’t expect and didn’t want. We will not be returning to our home and ministry in Papua New Guinea. This seems sudden, I know. And in a lot of ways it is. But in other ways it’s been coming for a year. Friends, we’ve just walked through a really dark season, and only now are we slowing down enough to realize the full weight of it. Much of what happened in PNG is something we can’t share, but like most real stories it’s littered with shards of broken people. It’s a hard, messy story, and we can’t pretend that away. A few months ago, a dear friend said to me, “You’ve had an awful lot of ashes this year, but I want to hear about the beauty.” She’s right. The ashes are undeniably real, and there’s no getting back some of the precious...
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