my own dear child eyes of bluest bright, alight body in holy motionbrimming over with lifesongand the beating, beating, beating heart beautiful breath that flows inside you like a melody for the gift of your love and living presence my heart trembles and sings (This is the image I saw outside my office window as…
Tag: life
I Stand in This Breath of My Life
I am alive. I’m trying to let that sink in. I inherited the unfinished sketchbook of a beloved art professor who passed away last spring. Flipping through the pages this morning, I see how alike we are in our interactions with the blank pages–line drawings, quotation marks surrounding deep theological ideas and questions, to-do lists,…
In the Wake of a Miracle (A First Attempt at Words)
*This post is the beginning of an attempt to respond to the Great Miracle that has happened in our lives through The Everyday Good. 2 a.m. In my bed, I wake to words that press in around me and won’t let me sleep. I get up and make my way to the quiet basement with…
Responding to the Love of God (Podcast Episode 10)
You can also listen and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. I want my life to be a response to the love of God. I am recording this podcast from a beautiful camp where we are staying for a couple of weeks while miracles are happening back home. My heart is just overflowing…
Looking Deeply Inside Myself (The beautiful work of journaling)
5:17 a.m. My eyes open in bed. I had a dream that woke first my mind, then my body. My face is pressed against a sweet, softly-sleeping baby. In the dark I lift him up and carry him across the room to place him gently in his crib. He doesn’t wake. A small miracle. I…
Broken Open-Hearted Love
Yesterday I learned that a dear friend is dying. There is no time to visit. No time to wrap up loose ends. This news just rips it all back open–that wound that I thought was nearly healed. The blow from my fall where I realized that death is actually a part of the human story….
Grief is a River
Grief is a river that now runs through my life. Sometimes it is slow and steady, passing gently over rocks of remembrance, pooling up in beautiful, idyllic scenes where the late afternoon sun brushes through the trees and paints the waters and the riverbank in bright splashes of quivering light. The aching beauty of having…
Standing in the Hallway of Sorrow, thoughts on losing my Mother
(In honor of my beautiful, selfless Mother who went home to be with Jesus yesterday afternoon, hours after I wrote this post.) I am going to write something that is braver and stronger than I now feel, but I believe it with all my heart. Daddy met Mama on a Sunday morning at a little…
Embrace the Mess, A Letter to My Future Self
This letter is to my future self. One day, when you are storming around your messy life as a mother of many small children, scowling at spilled crayons and upturned buckets of legos, haunted by the ghost of clean kitchens past… When you reach the point, clocking in late for laundry after a long day…
The Sacred Everyday
This morning I woke up to a miracle. All of my children are still soundly sleeping in their beds, except for the baby, who came down early to snuggle. Her head is fuzzy and soft like a little duck. The house is dark. And quiet. There is no birdsong yet. The hum of thought in…
Brave (or What Strangers Call Me in the Grocery Store)
Sometimes people don’t know what to say. When they see us in the grocery store–three little ones in the buggy, three bigger ones swarming around my waist–I can actually see them doing math in their heads. Is it possible that all of these children could belong to the same mother? I get a lot of…
Miss and Carry (A Little Life Remembered)
I miscarried nine days before our 15th anniversary. There we sat, across the table at a little cafe, drinking coffee together. Our six living children were home with a friend who gave us the day together to celebrate our marriage. The week before, Randy and I had privately laid the whisper of a body down…