Refiner’s Fire
-
moreWhen You Feel like Your Life’s a Mess …. The Real Truth About Your Dirt
On Thursday, May 17 th, 2012When he walks through the kitchen with his hair showered clean but his face looking like that, I just have to laugh. “What?” he says. “Really, I showered, Mom, I did.” Levi stands indignant, hands on hip, and I nod half serious. “You showered?” “Yes, Mom! It’s only my clothes that are dirty.” He’s been picking stones ...
-
moreThe Purpose of Pain: When Life Hurts
On Tuesday, May 15 th, 2012She stood under all that blue sky and watched the windmill spin round and was it the all the world turning that she could feel? How it spun and hurt and unfurled. Dandelions unfolded at her feet — suns, risings e...
-
moreWhen You Feel like Everyone is Bigger, Better, Smarter… { or ‘How to be a Star’}
On Thursday, May 03 rd, 2012When 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...
-
more3 Things to Hold on to When Life Hurts {Cherry Blossoms in Rain}
On Wednesday, April 25 th, 2012S he learned it haltingly in early spring, when the rain fell. When the edge of Japan washed away. When the sky slid down all the window panes. And a Sunday in spring, when a tornado sky rips up the earth, leaving this fury of questions, she plays on, the same song. Now surer, steadier. I stand at the windowsill. It still rains. The tomatoes plants try to stan...
-
moreWhat Your Scars Can Really Be …
On Monday, April 23 rd, 2012In the kitchen, after supper, while we stack the plates, she pulls up her sleeve to shows me her scars. “Did you see this one here on my arm?” When she bends, a tendril falls across her face, and her finger traces this whorl and I can see how the skin pulls, how pain is embroidered right into her. She is six and she is marked. And there is still so much road ahead. ...
-
more15 Reasons Why Community is Important …. {Even if You’ve Been Hurt}
On Thursday, April 12 th, 2012: 15 Reasons To Keep Reaching out {Even When You’ve Been Hurt} 1. Christ is the Body and He is Love and both can only exist in community 2. God’s people are given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5) and reconciliation begins first in our homes, down the street, in this pew, around the corner, in community — or we are mini...
-
morefor when your life seems turned upside down … {the practice of living Easter}
On Wednesday, April 11 th, 2012Turns out that all it takes to snap your back at the base is just a turning and a bending over to pick up a book. Turns out ‘safe’ isn’t a place you live at — but a Person you live in. Pleated there at the window, trying to straighten the back out again, trying to unfold upright again, I could see it — Snow falling, falling down in the orchard, fal...
-
moreWhat You Really Need to Know the Day After Easter
On Monday, April 09 th, 2012The shoes they wore Easter Sunday morning, us all sitting there in the very front row of Gorrie Bible Fellowship, they looked like they’d crossed 47 rolling dirt fields with a herd of tramping camels. And then had an all-out dust bath with a flock of sparrows. So much for new Easter threads and crisp white shirts and rooster tails smoothed down with a spit and a lick. For...
-
moreFiguring Out the Cross-Centered Life
On Wednesday, April 04 th, 2012{This is part of a series this week on preparing hearts for Easter. Part 1 of A Holy Week can be found here Part 2 of a Holy Week: A Family Activity for Passion Week can be found here} On the road to Calvary… two years ago this week… Life only emerges from black depths. And she’s a farmer’s daughter and she knows how new shoots come out of the dark earth and sh...
-
moreWhen Your Lent Sort of Stinks…
On Wednesday, March 07 th, 2012It’s sort of like the year of the rooster or year of the dog – This Lent, it’s just just up and named itself. Up and named itself the Lent of the Whale. I tear up lettuce for a salad and all I can see is the spouting of that whale. Light the Lenten candle, and there’s the shiny fin. Carry a heap of sheets to...
-
moreThe Secret to Fasting in a Lent that is Failing
On Wednesday, February 29 th, 2012Dust cloth in hand, that is what I’m thinking Lent’s all about. Don’t I desperately want to be changed when Easter morning dawns? For something different to have dawned in me. I wash things down. I m...
-
more4 Ways to be a Better Friend
On Thursday, February 23 rd, 2012It was after Mare Griebe* said she was done with me, that I knew. Mare, she had taken me to my first youth Bible study. She delivered the thick folded notes from the first boy who ever asked me out. And I had flown half across the country to be her maid of honor, then again, ten years later to hold her first baby. We talked lactation and I helped with latch and I thought we...
