“William,” Ellenor said, crouching down to see the eyes of her little brother, “where is Jesus?” “Um, gone?” he said, ‘gone’ being his standard response to any question having to do with location. “No!” She laughed, “he’s in your heart. Right here, see, William, in your heart!” And so saying, she patted his chest. As […]
Children Are Persons (so are we)
The screen taunted me, not doing what I demanded of it. “How in the world did you guys get it to do that thing last week?” I exclaimed. Shrugging, the ten year old wrinkled his brow into a question mark, matching mine. Ellenor shouted off all sorts of inapplicable advice. Havilah wriggled deeper onto my lap, and […]
In which Ellen White never raises her voice
Part of my husband’s inheritance as a fourth generation Seventh-Day Adventist was a vast collection of red-covered books by one of the church’s key founders, Ellen White. Most of the books were passed down from his great-grandfather, and at one point we had two whole shelves of these tiny tomes. Now, I have had a love-fear relationship with Ellen […]
Should The Writer Write?
(The comments on this post are excellent and profound. They bless me again, years later, and offer a better answer than my own post to the question “Should The Writer Write?”) When these 31 days of writing have ended I will do a follow-up post about what I’ve learned–and I have been learning. But I want […]
Sand: thoughts on change and how we grow
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. – William Blake My heart has been broken a dozen times this evening; broken, restored, broken again. The heavy things of life laid anchor, pulling my self-ship to […]
Morning Thoughts: Christ and Humanity
I am up early with my girls today. One wakens with the after-affects of a bloody nose spread across her skin, the other wakens with a belly full of giggles. We bathe, share bananas, and I brew a cup of coffee – a real treat, something I don’t usually get to consume. The sunrise is […]
Perform
There was a huge barrier to writing–and see, here I am writing about writing again, despite my noblest of intentions–that had its roots in a pressure to perform. One could say the same for living, for being. The pressure to perform draped my existence much the way a wet wool sweater might: heavy, weighing down. […]
The Writer Climbing
We hiked our favorite trail today before the sun arched high in the sky, and I remembered a hike we’d taken when Eddie was still an infant. It had felt like such a milestone then, to be out there on my own with five children. Now there are six, and somehow six seems easier than five. Today I had […]
The Writer Cowering
One of the things that makes it so hard for me to write–even though in writing I find an avenue of peace, of life — is that I am totally bound up in a consciousness of other people. Other people think things, after all, and what if they think of me? As far back into […]
Embrace Mindfulness; In Godliness, Live
I’ve been thinking about mindfulness these days. Every time I pull behind a familiar 4Runner, I giggle over these words on a bumper sticker: “Midwives Help People Out” and then I consider soberly these words on a second decal: “Embrace Mindfulness.” Embrace Mindfulness. A few months ago our three year began telling stories. In an […]
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