We all get discouraged. Yesterday I got discouraged at least three times before three o’clock. I didn’t know I was feeling low until a friend called and asked, “How are you?” “Discouraged,” I said, without skipping a beat. Some friends can take an honest answer. A true friend always can. (Thanks, Andree.) I felt better…
A 3×5 card hangs on my fridge with a three-line to-do list. The first two items are filled in with “Love God” and “Love Others.” The designer left the third line blank, and my daughter recently wrote in “Love Dogs.” My husband and I joke that, at only seven, she’s discovered the key to a…
Long before the emergency room doctor turned to me with sad eyes and told me my husband was gone, I knew. In fact, I think I knew he would not be revived while he was still on our bedroom floor, a half-dozen paramedics busily preparing him to be transported to the hospital. Something deep within…
My fearless, four-year-old daughter was overtired. We were on round two of pool play for the day at my dad and stepmom’s new house, and she was happily jumping from a smaller elevated pool area down into their larger pool over and over again. This time, however, she forgot that she wasn’t wearing her float…
Ann Voskamp recently wrote, “What you don’t know how to live through—Jesus died for. Where you don’t know how to go on—Jesus already went through. What feels hopeless—is where you meet more Jesus.” Hope is the thread I hang on to as my parents age. It is woven through the fabric of my life whether…
I will never forget the moment I walked in to find my mother had taken her last breath. I stopped in my tracks on the nursing home’s linoleum floor, asking my father, who was right behind me, “Is she dead?” Slowly, I backed away, up against the wall across from her bed, as I stared…