Gaining a heart of wisdom
For long years, I have ridden the bucking bronco of calling, leaning into the tension of being a fairly ambitious woman in a life that leaves little room for goals beyond laundry management and remembering to thaw something for dinner. Anyone with a Facebook account or a presence on Instagram knows that there are people… Continue reading When God Asks for More but it Looks Like Less
When jets fly overhead, stitching up the airspace between Boston's Logan and somewhere-in-Europe, by the time they reach the sky over Mid-coast Maine they are barely visible, nothing but contrails. My roots are deep here on this country hill, thirty thousand feet below, so I'm no globetrotter, but over the years, visitors from around the… Continue reading Musings: October 2018
My favorite hoe was a gift from a friend. Its blade is just the right size for scooping up the dirt to support a growing plant or for upending the roots of pesky weeds. While it's making a difference in the lay of the land and the weed-to-wanted-plant-ratio in my garden, its familiar feel in… Continue reading Musings: June 2018
If you want to live well and to share wisdom with your children and your neighbors about how they can also live well, the Bible will chart a sound course. If you are looking for inspiration or comfort or if you are preparing a speech, you will certainly want to lift some of the soaring… Continue reading How to Read the Bible without Dealing with God
We picked raspberries a couple of weeks ago -- the free kind that grow along the edges of fields and in the company of thistles. They were succulent. I could wrap words around a description of raspberry picking: the gentle encompassing pressure that releases a perfectly ripe berry from its stem; the empty white cone… Continue reading Life, Life, and More Life
One of my favorite fringe benefits in this mothering life is the broadening of my world. I routinely listen to conversations about welding and truck repair, have sat through hours and hours of livestock shows, and a few weekends ago, I witnessed my first triathlon. I watched in awe as, one by one, the participants… Continue reading Grow Up! (The Practice of Resurrection)
No one has to remind the forsythia bush outside my dining room window to break forth into yellow luminescence as an announcement that spring has come. The sassy gray squirrel steals shamelessly from the bird feeder "according to his kind," and the chickadee scolds and stitches up the air behind her -- because that is… Continue reading Attending to the Details of Congruence
Returning from a family vacation (and a blogging break!), it's great to be rested and to have stored up some delightful memories with my patient husband, our two youngest sons, and with dear friends who love us so much and so well that they even welcomed our big slobbery dog! On the Nightstand Not… Continue reading Musings — April 2017
"They laid its beams and hung its doors with its bolts and bars. "* Not exactly the stuff of which a "life verse" or a New Year's Resolution is made, But five times in Nehemiah's counter-clockwise tour of the wall we are confronted: What's the point of a walled city if the gates are not… Continue reading Just One Thing: Gates
"The moment one life impinges on another, politics begin." Well said, Eugene Peterson (as usual), and certainly Nehemiah learned this lesson repeatedly in his quest to rebuild the walls around Jerusalem. There is no avoiding politics because there is no avoiding power and its use and misuse. In Nehemiah's time, the minor officials of the… Continue reading Just One Thing: Politics
Living Our Days 