The first time I sat with our son while he was experiencing a panic attack, everything in me wanted to wrap my arms around him and make it stop. All I could do was pray and wait for it to pass. Anxiety and panic are all too familiar to my son’s generation. It’s estimated that…
The Redbud Post interviewed Catherine McNiel about her new book: Long Days of Small Things: Motherhood as a Spiritual Discipline. Why did you decide to write Long Days of Small Things: Motherhood as a Spiritual Discipline? A few years ago, I was a work-from-home mom with a baby, a toddler, and a preschooler. These precious, demanding…
A few years ago, when my daughter had just reached her first birthday, we took her on our church’s family mission trip. Those words don’t always go together: family and mission trip. But our church is committed to ministry that is done with the entire family, which I love, and which also makes me feel…
The first time I traveled internationally—I mean, really traveled, not just stuck my toe over our northern or southern border—was in 1984. I went to Oxford, England, to study for the summer and came back changed. My world had opened up, and I saw everything through a new lens. Travel became an important passion for…
My phone rang at 2 a.m., jarring me awake. I had been asleep for two hours in my hotel room, 1,000 miles from home. Not again, I thought. Which will this be—hospital or jail? It was jail. My son was calling to tell me it was all a mistake; he shouldn’t have been taken to…
I love to lead and teach. It’s a part of my natural gifting, the way I’m wired. These traits have been evident from an early age. My mom recalls with fondness the authority with which I lined up my stuffed animals in my bedroom after school, demanding their attention and presenting the new material I’d…
When I was nine, my family moved to a seven-acre plot of land. At night, cicadas buzzed and lightening bugs rose simultaneously with a mist from the creek. We ate mulberries from the tree while slapping mosquitos, and I trained tender pale-green pea vines up wire mesh. We spied goldfinches and bright-breasted orioles and mimicked…
My kids love to build lemonade stands. But I hate them. I am really ashamed to admit this because it seems like something a mother should embrace as the joy of summertime. Kids selling lemonade is so small-town sentimental, so community creating. The idea that people might stop on their walks or pull over in…
We always knew where her house was because of the huge palm tree in the front yard, which could be seen from blocks and blocks away. Planted when my dad was just a boy, the tree swayed in the ocean breeze and beckoned us inside where a little glass jar of Hershey chocolates fell into…
Summer is here. The world is screaming it. The trees have leaves, the grass is green, the sun is shining, and my son’s school is ending. The question comes up quite frequently: What are you going to do to keep busy this summer? Almost daily we receive fliers from recreation centers, churches, schools inviting my…
What do you do when you hear your teenager say, “I’m bored”? I’ve done everything to survive summers as a mom. When they were little, I took them to a playroom in a cafe while enjoying refillable drinks and air conditioning. Bliss. Or to “rec centers,” which have an endless array of affordable camps that…
I have a little secret: I never wanted to be a mother. At least not in the conventional sense. And certainly not a mother to four. I wasn’t one of those baby-loving, babysitting girls who fawned over the little ones in the church nursery. I had more important things to do like schoolwork and have a…
I remember reading Kathleen Norris’ slim volume called The Quotidian Mysteries, where she talks about washing dishes as an entrance into the holy. And reading Ann Voskamp and her contemplation of the views outside of her kitchen window as moments of experiencing the goodness of God that she would number as gifts. It all felt…
My husband and I had the honor of officiating our eldest son’s wedding this summer. After the ceremony, all one hundred guests gathered under an enormous tent in our front yard where tables laden with hundreds of sunflowers and cosmos, heaps of perfectly prepared barbecue, and ice cold root beers awaited them. We toasted, feasted,…