Years ago, I had a delightful life coach and mentor by the name of Dayle. She encouraged me to make a personal development plan for that season of my life. Being a planner by nature, I was excited to show her what I thought was a well-balanced plan. She took one look at it and…
“I hate it when people tell me everything happens for a reason,” the 18-year-old missionary stated. Defiant tears were in her eyes. “Do people really think God ordains evil? Do they believe he wants these things to happen? Do they not understand that we have choice—choice!”? Her hurt and anger are palpable. The ancient debate…
Those who shake their family tree may be pelted with details they’d rather not know. The blight I encountered in my particular grove was cancer—multiple varieties, hereditary strains. Suddenly I feel a deep kinship with the unending parade of friends and acquaintances who are hearing the word cancer breathed into the air of clinical spaces….
Cancer grows in odd places and moves in unseen ways. A big mass in his chest. A tiny spot in his spine. The bad, old cells clumping together to attack and destroy. In the beginning, death seems like the biggest and only potential thief. You do not yet realize that cancer will steal his hair…
“Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.” The whispered phrase, repeated like a Gregorian chant as John leaned back against the bathroom wall submitting to my husband’s lifting of one foot, then the other. The immediate goal, get him into a clean pair of pajamas and prevent him from collapsing on the floor….
I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea when our phone rang. Our family physician was on the other end of the line. Dr. Love (don’t you love his name?) wanted to speak to my husband. I carried the receiver up to John, then left the room to give him some privacy. When…
We are both cancer survivors, my husband and I. Like many people, I had always feared hearing that diagnosis. My father, a non-smoker, had lung cancer, passing on at age 68 just three months after being diagnosed. My mother had bladder cancer in her 80s that required a long and difficult treatment plan. And then…
What’s in a name? A name helps us be known by others, to connect. When I named my two girls, I chose names that spoke value and caught a glimpse into their character and who they might become. My parents set the stage for choosing names. They chose mine because of a movie: True Grit….
“I don’t know if I can marry you,” I tell my boyfriend as we snuggle on the couch in his parents’ living room. “If I do, you have to promise to let me go to Africa, alone if I have to. I don’t know when, and I don’t know why. But I know God has…
Doll Houses. Ghetto houses. Foster homes. Group homes. Children’s homes. So many houses. So few homes. I stand in front of a dilapidated building in an urban neighborhood. Its porch is sagging to the right, the railing on the stoop has long been broken off, leaving a jagged, rusted stump jutting up from the crumbling concrete…
When I was the proud mother of a newborn, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, I thought parenting couldn’t get any tougher. Every day was a blur of caretaking, feeding and physical lifting. Merely strapping the three kids in the car ate up 10 minutes, and this was after the 20-minute prelude of coats and shoes….
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life. Proverbs 13:12 Heather Jo sits in her eighth grade home economics class sewing a pillow. The shape is uneven and the stuffing bulky, so she decides to rip open the seams and try again. She knows that if she keeps…
Once again, it was Winnie and me behind the bake sale table, while all the real excitement of the annual plant sale swirled through adjacent rooms. Winnie is a whiz at organizing the diverse, nearly random donations from friends of the land trust. Arrayed around us on three cloth-covered tables are blueberry cake, rhubarb and…
When Momae moved up north to Massachusetts to join Daddy, she brought her most precious possessions stuffed inside my granddaddy’s big brown leather suitcase. She also brought recipes handed down from my Nana, some hastily scribbled on paper, and others committed to memory. Daddy was an ensign in the Navy; his ship docked in Boston…