Restless
Something about this time of year makes me restless. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but every autumn it’s there. This sense of not quite fitting into my skin. Maybe it’s the foreshadowing of winter months ahead, since I’ve never done well with cold and grey. Or maybe it’s just the reminder that things don’t stay the same, that seasons come and go even if we’re not quite ready. It’s not that I don’t enjoy autumn. I love it, actually. Sweaters and candles, cinnamon and trees like flame… I just find that my thoughts scatter easily, like dry leaves in the wind, and I feel deep things I can’t define. When I was pregnant, my girls would roll and stretch, pushing hard against the deepest parts of me. I remember thinking how uncomfortable and alien and...
Read MoreThe Roundabout Road
I just got back from an event in Nashville, where I spent a couple of days in the presence of some truly great people, many of them musicians, songwriters, and artists. These folks have built careers on their ability to dig deep and measure life honestly, and as I heard them tell their stories, some themes emerged. Hard journeys. Grief. Poor choices. Wounding and being wounded. But, most of all, grace. The roads they have traveled have been anything but straight, with sudden turns twisting like knotted thread. But never once were they lost. It may have felt like it in certain seasons, when nothing about their lives looked the way they expected. But when something is lost, the one who is searching does not know where it is. And the Searcher knew all along....
Read MoreLosing Control
Since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to know how and why things happen. I like to understand what’s going on, to be able to predict an outcome, to have a certain amount of control over my world. Which is why I’ve had a hard time recently. For the last year and a half, I’ve been taking a medication to prevent the chronic migraines I’ve had since college. It helped for a time, but over the last few months, my migraines began to come back full force. Nothing I tried really made a difference, so after talking with my doctor, I decided to wean off the medication. The side effects of this medicine were difficult to deal with, even on the best days, so I was looking forward to having those chemicals out of my system. What I didn’t expect was how rough the weaning...
Read MoreThe Waiting
We thought it would be easy. We didn’t plan for our first baby. She arrived, an unexpected gift, eleven days before our first anniversary. So, naturally, we thought having more kids would be quick and uncomplicated. But we waited, and the years passed. One miscarriage. Then another. Our girl grew older and noticed all the other kids with siblings. She was lonely, she said. She wanted a sister more than anything in the world. And the fire burned deep and I needed to know why, but no answer came. Just a seed of quiet acceptance that grew until the day we gave away the crib, the clothes, the toys. But without telling us, she kept praying, unaware of all the reasons why her heart’s desire wasn’t likely to be granted. If I had known how she prayed, I might have...
Read MoreYou’re Gonna Be Great!
It’s that season again, when the graduation announcements come rolling in. Another crop of scholars, fresh-faced and starry-eyed, ready to sweat in their caps and gowns while commencement speakers everywhere wax eloquent about the keys to success and notoriety. And then off they’ll go to celebrate. And some of them will go on to do what they had planned all along and to succeed at it. But many of them will have things happen that will knock them off course, change their paths little by little or all at once. And there may come a point down the road, when they hear of former classmates who have advanced in their fields and are receiving acclaim, that they pause, look at where they have landed and think, “I really could have been something.” I found myself in...
Read MoreThe Hollow and the Healing
In recent weeks I’ve heard some rough, ragged, just plain hard stories. What do you say to a woman who has watched her daughter wither and fade completely away, die under the weight of the lie that she wasn’t good enough the way God made her? What about the lady in her 70’s dealing with decades-old wounds surfacing, fresh and throbbing? The young woman, abused and abandoned, and then chosen, only to be abandoned again? The mother who is afraid she has scarred her children? The broken soul, convinced there are some things so twisted and mangled not even God can redeem them? The more people I meet, the more stories I hear, the more I realize how stunningly complex life is. There are as many heartaches as there are fingerprints, and pat, manufactured answers are...
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