As autumn arrives, I reflect on the past year and how beauty has saved me. What comes to mind first is not the church (though I am grateful for her fellowship and sacraments), but the accidental garden in our front yard. The goodness of God is cloaked in mystery, which became apparent in the unexpected…
After a grueling season of working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, my husband’s time off finally arrived! When you work in football, you do not have the freedom to choose your vacation time, but you do get almost four glorious weeks off each summer. We had made our plans, filling these long-anticipated days with…
For years, I clung to the notion that bad decisions led to bad stories and good decisions led to good stories. I desperately and naïvely wanted to believe this was true—that we had some control over our stories. But we know it isn’t true, don’t we? We live in a broken world, and our stories…
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.” ~Mother Teresa When I first met my sweet hubby, J, I fell hard for his beautiful heart. He hardly had two pennies to his name, but he had a heart of pure gold, and I was just plain smitten. He also had the tendency…
My favorite jeans are starting to cut into my waist in an uncomfortable way. The grocery order keeps getting delayed when we’re already out of milk. The dog has gotten into the trash again. My kids carry individual sadnesses I can’t fix for them. It’s rainy and cold. My hip aches at night sometimes. People…
Growing up in Florida, I never experienced four distinct seasons. When I migrated north in my late thirties, I quickly realized I did not care for snow, but I was captivated by the daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths that seemed to burst from the ground just as the snow melted. It still fascinates me that, after…