A picture of my friend’s blue-eyed baby girl hung on the wall as we sat at her kitchen table and caught up on life since I’d last hugged her neck four years ago. Last time, I met her for a hurried lunch as I passed through Nashville. This time my sister was with me as […]
One of the hardest things for me during our years in family ministry was unfinished stories. More often than not, we watched our students blossom and their families flourish, but there were times we could do very little to help move a struggling family towards healing. It’s a special kind of hard to see a
A friend asked me the other day how I’m feeling this anniversary of my mom’s death. It will be seven years next week. How is it already seven years? How is it only seven years? My friend knows something you can only know by experience: that every year grief looks different than the year before.
I usually don’t even feel the words burrowing until they’re already under my skin. A little comment here, a critical thought there, slipping in and lodging like tiny splinters that feel like they should be easy to ignore. And there they sit, taking root until I’ve incorporated their poison and pain into my movements like
The anxious thoughts rolled in the morning after we got the big news. We finally had enough financial partnership to cover our budget, and we could start our next season of ministry. We’ve served with a large missions organization since 2004, and my new role in our org combines two of my greatest passions –
We Christians can be trundlers, clumsy with our heavy feet and careless steps. We can be tanglers of words, crushers and blinders of tender minds. We Christians can be foolish dancers to the tunes of snake charmers, the music of lie peddlers who steal and sell the name of Christ. We can hide behind our
Dear Lovely Friend, I saw it in your eyes today, that exhaustion that comes from dangling with all your loose ends for so long. Yesterday you weren’t sure how you would do today, and today you’re not sure how you’ll do tomorrow. You hoped it would all be over by now, but it’s not, and
A friend of mine stepped out of her skin last week, right out of a body worn down by 17 years of tumors and treatments. She was beautiful, and cancer is an evil mockery of creation. But here’s the thing – she wouldn’t have been who she was without it. Every day my friend chose
My friend gave me the gift of dust. Layered years of it covered photo albums, scrapbooks, and drawings, and as I transferred them from deep shelves into moving boxes, the dust clung to my hands and shirt like tiny, sacred bits of her family’s story. There were pictures of my friend with her college sweetheart
I wonder how they felt there perched on the edge, those men and women and little ones getting ready to put themselves between impossible walls of water. I wonder if that first step down the bank was hard, with the unnatural path ahead stretching long and dark. The line must have been slow, all those