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 […]
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
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
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
“Do we have any ground grief? I mean ground beef?” My daughter laughed at her verbal slip-up before pausing and tilting her head thoughtfully. “Ground grief. Hmm. I wonder what that would look like.” She shrugged, laughed again, and left me standing there with an unexpected lump in my throat and an unbidden series of
A little leaf hitched a ride in the door on the bottom of my sock. It’s one of those days when the sky is just gray enough to make the rusts and yellows of the trees look a bit other-worldly, and I couldn’t make myself pause to put my shoes on. It wasn’t long ago
Somewhere along the way I lost my grip on hope. Maybe it was during those days that I leaned, with a baby on my hip, to adjust my mama’s IV line and put balm on her dry lips. While she drew near to the edge of glittering eternity, maybe it was then that I began
I remember the smell after flood waters start to go down. It’s not something you can forget. We had floods almost every year where I grew up in the Philippines, and they usually did nothing more than turn low lying fields into muddy lakes around houses perched on tiny green islands. But when the water