Have you ever had a dream where you wonder if you are dreaming? In those kinds of dreams, I have often told myself I must be dreaming, because in real life you never question if you are awake. Or in real life, have you ever suddenly been jolted into a heightened sense of reality–through intense…
Tag: Hope
Faith and Miracles (How Do You Feed Them, Answered)
One of the first questions people ask me when I tell them we have seven children is, “How do you feed them?” It’s posed as a joke, and even though I’ve been asked this dozens of times, I still scramble for a good response. I know people don’t only mean how do we pay for…
Embracing This Breath
The perfect beauty of this morning actually hurts me. As I steal a quiet hour in my little garden with a cup of coffee, the world saturated in green, trees in bloom, birdsong, the first signs of new life coming up in my raised beds… My heart aches. The unabashed brilliance of life. It stings….
Hope and Miracles
What in the world is even happening? I find myself sifting through the media, shaking my head in wonder at all the different perspectives that claim to be true. I read statistics from experts in every field, see photographs that prove the arguments without a doubt, absorb the shocking headlines. I hear yelling from every…
The Space Between Here and a Miracle
If you are up, like me, at 2 a.m., wrestling with questions that do not seem to have answers, tired of trying to drown out your own thoughts so you can finally get some sleep, welcome to this post. Get up and join me at my kitchen table. It is soooo quiet. I just got…
Vision and Hindsight, A Tale of Two Lists
The year flew by. This morning I was sitting at the kitchen table, lamenting all the things that I meant to do last year–my open journal with the list I scribbled down, wide-eyed, like a child on her birthday, a January ago. Beautiful vision. And just like that, I blinked, and those twelve months are…
On Words (In every storm, mercy…)
Words are a comfort to me. They press in around me while I am lying awake in bed. I can feel the word mercy wrap me up like a weighted blanket. I have heard the heavy clank and felt the ground shake under the weight of that word as it anchored my soul to the…
Slowing Down This Christmas Season (Creative Family Advent 2018)
Christmas is coming, and I am longing to anticipate it with more wonder and joy. With slowness and purpose, deep gratitude and a supernatural ability to see beyond the busyness into the sacred. I want us to savor these days as a family and make memories that will last well after the childhood years have…
On our 12th Anniversary
Today is our anniversary. We met in the fall of 1999, dated for three and a half long, confusing years, and married on a beautiful spring morning just like this one 12 years ago today. I hoped I was doing the right thing. I prayed I was doing the right thing. There is no one…
Longing
Longing. This word won’t leave me alone. It first jumped out of the pages of Mere Christianity (by C.S. Lewis) a few weeks ago, and since then, it has worked itself into every book, every movie, and every mini-drama of my life. The word itself can give me the feeling. (((Do you know what I mean?)))…