Faith
-
moreWhen You Sort of Feel Like You’re Drowning
On Thursday, May 23 rd, 2013It came after a week of rain. After she driven home through the rain, watched the rain come across fields. It’d ponded between rows. It had sheeted and ponded and thrummed the hood of the pick-up like the drumming of everything thrown at her, everything coming down that never stopped, and all the fiel...
-
moreWhen you’re wondering: How God Feels About Storms?
On Tuesday, May 21 st, 2013When the guy on the screen says that he could hear the cries of children underneath the rubble, his voice starts to crack and how in the world does anything stand in a world like this? How do you just put a jug of milk out on the table on a Tuesday and stand there watching your kids eat breakfast, light in their hair, the sky hanging outside the window like a ...
-
moreHow to Live Through the Really Hard Storms
On Monday, May 20 th, 2013{because my heart is with all the folks living through all kinds of bad storms this spring…} ‘If God really works in everything — then why don’t we thank Him for everything?” She asks me this straight out. My daughter, Hope, and I, we sit in the truck on the field’s hem, waiting to give the Farmer his lunch. The Farmer’s planting bean seeds into ea...
-
moreSimply 3 Words For Every Day
On Wednesday, May 15 th, 2013He’d set the alarm for 1 AM on a Monday morning because sometimes a man has to do what he has to do. He’d slept the rest of a Farmer on the Lord’s Day. Then hauled to the fields in the pitch dark just as soon as Monday feebly birthed. Before that sun finally dragged up, he had a whole field worked up and half a ton of dirt ground into his jeans. ...
-
moreWhen You Feel like Everyone is Bigger, Better, Smarter… { or ‘How to be a Star’}
On Monday, May 13 th, 2013When the fog meandered in lost on a spring evening in May, she hung her apron up in the back mudroom. She wandered down the back lane too. Down in the woods, she could hear them, the frogs singing, an invisible symphony. She knotted the one side of her skirt up to step over a pothole. She tried to make her way. In a world of reaching, how do you rest? In a cul...
-
moreThe Ultimate Girlfriend Gift
On Wednesday, May 08 th, 2013We threw stones first. I mean — after we’ve all been bloodied by stones, why not just start there? Effie Bryce sat near Nan Marlin. And Greta Vanderhoef and Darlene Finch, and 75 year-old Mrs. Margaret van Veen who led me to Jesus when I was a kid and the elderly Mrs. King who lives on the farm ...
-
more40 Things You Need to Know Before You’re 40 . . . . Letters to a Woman Mid-Way
On Tuesday, April 30 th, 2013Dear Self, Look, you have only got so many days till your midway. Till you’ve heard almost half the morning doves you ever will. Felt the sun on your face half as many chances as you’ll have, laughed half as many times as you’ll ever know — and who knows, maybe most of your God-blessed moments are already passed? So for the holy sake of sanity get off th...
-
more4 Things You Really Need to Know about Your Gifts
On Wednesday, April 17 th, 2013Priscilla Shirer has become the most encouraging friend and heart sister and the way this woman wields the Word arrests me every time. If we are going to begin the cataclysmic paradigm shift to “Life is a gift” … begin to count all the gifts – then we realize each of us are gifted and these words that Priscilla has mined are utterly life-giving&...
-
more
-
more
-
moreWhen Life Burns… What We Could Do for Each Other
On Wednesday, April 10 th, 2013When that chimney started on fire, right up the center of the house, right up through center of my bedroom, I heard my Dad holler. Heard the roar, heard that fire roaring just behind the yellow bricks there in my room. That yellow brick road that you could follow straight up to the sky. I cu...
-
moreWhat Christians Need to Know about Mental Health
On Monday, April 08 th, 2013Dear Church, Cancer can be deadly and so can depression. So can the dark and the shame and the crush of a thousand skeletons, a thousand millstones, a thousand internal infernos. We could tell you what we know. That — depression is like a room engulfed in flames and you can’t breathe for the soo...
