We never really know what we are building with our lives. I try so hard to understand what it’s all about. I pray for vision, I research my past for clues, I desperately seek God for the next step. This is the life of faith. And though we may think our lives will look one…
Tag: loss
Every Morning I Wake in an Ocean (Chapter 4 Read Aloud of The Sacred Everyday Book, available exclusively on the podcast, epsiode #37)
This chapter is a collection of writings that were born out of many difficult seasons of my life. The exhaustion of motherhood, the weight of raising a family, the struggle to find my breath after grief knocked the wind out of me. I share my search for hope and beauty in spite of, and often…
Standing in the Hallway of Sorrow (Chapter 3 Read-Aloud about The Search for Beauty in Grief) Podcast #36
Today I send my most vulnerable and intimate words out into the world, written at moments in my life when grief was shaking me down to the very core. In this chapter of my book, I share about miscarriage and the death of my beautiful mother. These words chronicle the numbing pain of loss, the…
my heart trembles and sings
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…
I Go Back to the Ocean of My Childhood
When you were a childdid you lose yourself at the seashoreand forget life aches? Did you run to the waters laughing? I go backto the ocean of my childhoodwhere I was a girlphotographed by my mother,my father looking out to sea I want the waves to whisper somethingbut they are stillsuspended in memorythey do not…
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,…
Early Morning Read Alouds
Have you heard about my newest project? It’s called Early Morning Read Alouds. In these daily Facebook Live videos, I sit at my kitchen table (after just rolling out of bed around 4:30 a.m.) and share my heart and writing. I love doing this! And I am honestly a little surprised that I have been…
Flashback to Sixteen (Through the Lens of My Journal)
Flashback to sixteen. I had almost forgotten this season of great sorrow that I experienced in my childhood and early teen years. My memory has softened, and I tend to look back and summarize my childhood as a happy one. I was loved, cherished by my parents, befriended by my eight older siblings. The hardest…
First Birthday (love song for a baby)
You came to me from a distant landThe secret place of my innermost beingYou traveled miles and milesTo find me You came in the space between my two greatest sorrows. When the lamp of my womb went out, suddenlyLeaving me with a cold-wind feelingLike the door to every chamber of my heartHad been left blowing…
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…
Being There (On the Shores of Life and Loss)
A week ago we cried over the body of my beloved Mother. She is gone. This keeps hitting me like ocean waves, one after the other. How it swells. How it breaks. It all seems like a dream. The next day was of course a birthday. My daughter’s third. The only time to cry was…