Family
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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moreWhy Mother’s Day is for the Birds
On Friday, May 10 th, 2013Because I ain’t no Hallmark mother – and none of us are, if we’re really truth-telling here. If we’re honest– and what else is there really — there were burnt dinners and yelling mornings and neck strained words over lost shoes and scattered Legos and unfinished homework and there were cru...
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moreSo God Made a Mother:
When the Giving Tree is Really The Giving Mother *UpdatedOn Monday, May 06 th, 2013So, sure, there was this talk of The Giving Tree – but there wasn’t one of us who didn’t know all along it was you, The Giving Mother. You who leaned over a stove and stirred and let spices fall like leaves and you ladled and we slurped and it would be remembered when we ...
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moreHow to Focus in an Age of Distraction: 10 Things to do Before you Click {Printable}
On Wednesday, April 24 th, 2013There are robins finally. And mud ringing the laundry room tub and the clocking ticking and the faucet dripping. We turn pages. Get turned around. Somebody stubs their toe. Somebody is held. Somebody holds on. A screen flickers. There is only so much time. {10 Things to d...
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moreWhat Gosnell and the Gospel Mean to the Brave …
On Tuesday, April 16 th, 2013Dear Son, So your GPS can say that it’s about 5 hours and 24 minutes from Steubenville to Gosnell’s clinic in Philadelphia? But you’d be about right if you said Gosnell and Steubenville were right around the corner from one another. And you were about right when you said that Gosnell is as much about us as Steubenville ever was. ...
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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...
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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...
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moreAfter Steubenville: 25 Things Our Sons need to know about Manhood
On Wednesday, March 20 th, 2013Dear Son, When you’re the mother of four sons, Steubenville is about us. Steubenville is about having a conversation with sons about hard things and asking you to do holy things. Because a Steubenville doesn’t begin with football and it doesn’t begin with alcohol and it ...
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moreThe 1 Thing Radical Really Definitely Has to Look Like — Right Where We Are
On Friday, March 15 th, 2013No one just straight up tells you that the things you’ve seen — become what you see. That you’ll close your eyes a thousand nights from now and it will all be real again — where you were and what they wore, that one look, that one moment, that one frame. That you’ll see the world through what you’ve seen of the world and there’s no goi...
