Gaining a heart of wisdom
It must have seemed as if his life was over. At the age of fifteen, swept up in the aftermath of his country's demise, in a series of cruel blows, he was enslaved, deported eight hundred miles -- never to see his homeland again, stripped of his identity, and given a strange and foreign name.… Continue reading Move Heaven. Change Nations.
“These bean plants are a mess,” I muttered. “But, wow . . . lots of beans.” Our eleven rows of Providers (that’s the variety of green bean we always plant) had lived up to their name, but after four pickings, the plants looked tired, ransacked, plundered. They looked like us. I smile when I say… Continue reading Parenting Past the Mid-Point: More Thoughts from the Garden
The epigraph for Psalm 142 reads: “A contemplation of David. A prayer when he was in the cave.” How wonderful that David knew God could hear him from his gloomy hiding place. These thoughts, shared today, were written during the summer of 2014, at the beginning of my mum’s precipitous decline, and from my season… Continue reading A Prayer from the Cave
My grown-up boys have a particular smile that I see whenever they come to the house, and I start hauling food out of the refrigerator. It's a combination of, "She really can't help herself, can she?" and "Well . . . I might be persuaded to eat a sandwich." Even though I can't keep a… Continue reading “Mother” Is a Verb, Too
He walked into the bank, obviously carrying a heavy load, and wearing a proud smile. "I can help you over here," I chirped in my newly fluent teller-ese, and the white plastic bucket landed with a thud on the counter. He had personally counted and rolled over five thousand pennies and was bringing his loot… Continue reading Musings – June 2016
I can just barely admit this, but I have finally hauled all the cassette tapes -- John Michael Talbot, Carole King, Billy Joel -- out from under my bed. And I’m going to throw them away. Letting go of this one thing may not free my hands to grab hold of an entire universe, but… Continue reading Are We Following?
Everyday, the townspeople of Thrim would ask, "Hey, Yoj, how are you today?" And everyday, Yoj would answer, "I am fabulous and full of life!" And why shouldn't he be? Yoj was the happy doll maker who awoke each day with a song on his lips and dinner invitations almost every night -- until one day a mysterious stranger… Continue reading Fabulous and Full of Life!
Welcome to Hope Harbor where the pace is slow, but news travels fast; where visitors arrive to relax and clear their mind of distractions and then come away with new perspective. It's an unlikely destination for Eric Nash with his partner-track position at a high-end Portland law firm. But when "a strategic repositioning" leaves him… Continue reading The Things We Most Desire
Even though the class was a disaster, I still regret quitting high school physics. I wish that I had hung in there with my little TI-30 calculator and all the boys who wore theirs in "denim-look" vinyl cases hanging off their belts or bulging from their shirt pockets -- not because I suddenly care about… Continue reading Persevering – in Grace
If it is true that, as we age, we become even more of whatever we have been all our lives, then Luci Shaw is becoming more and more difficult to "shelve." A poet and essayist well into her eighties, she continues to tackle topics ranging from quantum mechanics and the incarnation to the haecceity** of… Continue reading Partners in Revelation: Bringing Beauty into View
