Gaining a heart of wisdom
Last year, I started reading through the Old Testament book of Ezekiel with a friend. Initially, I dreaded the project, my only other exposure to the eccentric prophet having been my annual flyovers, gulping down three or four chapters at a time in a hurry to get to the end. This slow read has been… Continue reading Even After Everything, Will You Make The Choice To Trust?
(...and a new Christmas fiction book just for fun!) The first Sunday of Advent is less than a month away! What will you do this year to celebrate, reflect, and renew your sense of awe that God the Son would hunker down and wizen up and enter the darkness of this world? The incarnation is… Continue reading Four New Resources for Your Advent Reflection
In his iconic poem "How to Be a Poet," Wendell Berry sums up all of creation in one lovely sentence: There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." He cuts directly to the chase of our persistently false categories and my own personal tendency to desecrate the sacred by forgetting… Continue reading The Importance of Prayer in a Sacred Life
I spent most of my twenties looking in the mirror at a face I didn't love. Makeup interventions, hairstyle adjustments, and even color analysis failed to take the edge off my conviction that something about my face was simply not right. Around the same time, I discovered C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces and felt… Continue reading Learning to Love the Face You’ve Been Given
I'm not in the habit of schlepping Bible commentaries with me in the car, but we were playing tourist, staying at an Airbnb with no more exciting plans than to sit in lawnchairs facing Moosehead Lake. For me, vacation means reading, and Amy Peeler's commentary on Hebrews was at the top of my TBR pile.… Continue reading The Trustworthiness of God in the Book of Hebrews
When I'm teaching a group of women I'm meeting for the first time, I try to begin with some small part of my story. I talk about my four sons or my adorable grandchildren. I might mention my garden in the summer or complain about the early winter darkness here on this country hill in… Continue reading A Fresh View that Deepens an Already Beloved Tale
With the right book and enough time, reading becomes a form of transportation, a deep river that carries me along in the current of words, characters, and ideas. Simply looking at the cover or hearing the title of certain favorite books evokes a place and a time and even remembered dialogue as if I had… Continue reading Have We Lost the Essential Practice of Deep Reading?
"Remember, now, we're looking for interesting shapes in nature," I advised my grandson as he picked a tiger lily to add to his collection. We ranged far and wide in search of ferns, winged seeds, leaves both pinnate and palmate, and anything else that caught his eye. His new bright red T-shirt was stretched out… Continue reading Look to Creation for a Story of Hope and Flourishing
The insistent tone of my cell phone’s timer carried through floorboards to our basement schoolroom--another call to prayer unanswered. I sighed, turned the page, and continued with my sixth-grader in a lesson on fractions. I had been reading about the historical practice of praying the hours, setting aside intentional moments throughout the day at specific… Continue reading Holiness in the Here and Now
Posted with thanks, unabashed hero worship, and apologies to the memory of E.B.White (7/11/1899 – 10/1/1985), author of Charlotte’s Web and other beloved tales. He wrote “Memorandum,” originally published in Harper’s Magazine in October of 1941 and then compiled into One Man’s Meat in 1942, along with numerous other exquisite essays from White’s writing life. Please celebrate with me the beauty of… Continue reading A Merry Memorandum and an Important Resource for Epiphany
Living Our Days 