Our footsteps echoed on the wooden planks as we left the riverbank and stepped out over the water. The old walking bridge had stretched across that expanse of dark river for as long as the townspeople could remember. Several generations had held hands and stood right there in the center of the bridge, watching the…
I love a good crime drama. Call me hooked on NCIS (all of them), Elementary, Murder She Wrote reruns, and any other show that has the whodunnit element. In TV Land, the case is closed when the good guys get the bad guys because these shows stop short of what happens next: trial by jury….
You never know when a simple story will be powerful, like the one I heard while watching the first memorial service for U.S. Senator John McCain. I didn’t intend to watch the whole service when I turned on the TV, but the tributes were stirring. McCain colleague Grant Woods talked about his decades-long friendship with…
“A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink.’ . . . the Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) John 4:7-9 (ESV) Not only was she a…
This past winter I traveled to my childhood home in the northern woods of Wisconsin. My soul hungers for the inky dark nights and the quiet forests, and when I’m there in winter, I spend a lot of time staring out the windows at the trees and the snow. The temperatures hung below zero during…
I’m a homebody. I love the comfort and security of being at home. Most evenings you can find me curled up on the couch reading a book or on my laptop writing—two of my favorite things to do. I’m also a mom to four kids, and because I homeschool them, we spend many hours at…