“The Lord be with you,” I proclaim to begin a class. “And also with you,” the students answer. We follow this greeting by responsively reading a psalm aloud. My class at a Christian university meets only three times a week and reads only one psalm each time, but I’m hopeful. Even if we’re skipping down…
“Why would God make one of the Ten Commandments about jealousy? Nobody can control jealousy!” asked my 7-year-old. Good question. Once, my first impulse might have been to say, “So we try harder.” Big mistake. When my younger daughter was very small, she would wriggle from the towel, her sturdy, smooth limbs bending and extending,…
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…