Faith

The Parable of the Exploding Ketchup

We pulled out of the zoo and immediately they started asking for more. “Can we go out for Ice cream?!”  “Can we go out for dinner?!”   “Oh please Mom! Oh please!” We’d just spent hours traipsing around the zoo, petting the wallabies, climbing the wooden train and tracking down the tigers. We weren’t there for […]

Accepting the Process

It’s a pat​t​ern that’s been there since the beginning, but it’s taken me most of my adult life to see it.  I am an achievement-oriented person. I love to check things off lists and accomplish goals. In a society like the United States, it’s a pretty common way of interacting with the world. It is […]

Let Them Live

My husband is from the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. He’s at home in the outdoors. He’s a skier and a hiker and a rock climber. He loves the idea of overnights in the wilderness, navigating with a compass and the stars. My preferred form of adventure is trying a new grocery store, but I’ve […]

Carrying Hope

My hardest days at work aren’t the days when my students are loud or disobedient or unkind to each other. Those days are hard, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t the hardest. We have procedures and consequences in place for those things, we learn from them and then we move on. Those are the […]

The Places We Are Pierced

“Wondering what it means to follow a God who points to his scars as a sign of resurrection.” – Antonia Terrazzas It is the Thomas part that they always harped on in Sunday school. Thomas, the guy who was doubting, the guy who didn’t believe. It was not the Jesus part, and it certainly wasn’t […]

Planting Ourselves in This Dirt

I spent the first eighteen months looking for signposts that life sprouts here in our new state. After a historically snowy winter last year in Michigan, I stalked trees for buds. I gently nudged snow from the neighbor’s crocuses with the toe of my boot, my soul hungry for a flowering something, anything that signified […]

Dead Stone Come to Life

When I think of resurrection, I think of a stone on my kitchen counter. I picked it up at the beach last year. It’s smooth and gray, like most of the rocks on the beach, with one difference: The holes. One hole pierces its middle. Two opened seashells lodge in another empty space like baby […]

Surviving Racial Disasters

It Happened. Again. Sneaker waves of racist lashes and systematic suicides keep hitting our neighborhoods, news feeds and nerve systems. Past reports about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Ezell Ford have now been replaced with fresh videos of Walter Scott, Philip White, Eric Harris and Freddie Gray. I have screamed, cried, cussed and […]

The First Blizzard

I really couldn’t have scripted it better, the blizzard rolling into the city just in time for my second trip to the hospital that month. The first one had been unplanned, a midnight ambulance ride on the first deeply cold night of the year. I shared the emergency room at the city hospital with the […]

Between Rock Face and River

  When Phoenix started walking she pretty much just skipped the “find your feet” part and just went into full-scale running. She would run with this awkward gait, her hands flung out at her side, her head pushed out as far as it could go, and she would sprint on her toes. She did nothing […]

An Atmospheric Low of the Soul

cy·clone ˈsīˌklōn/ noun METEOROLOGY a system of winds rotating inward to an area of low atmospheric pressure, with a counterclockwise (northern hemisphere) or clockwise (southern hemisphere) circulation; a depression. Four months into the journey of motherhood, and my world is spinning. Sleepless nights, disordered days and the constant companionship of self-doubt swirl around me fiercely. […]

Pulling in the Anchor

      I am afraid of the sea.    Like my phobia of heights, this fear is at odds with the rest of me. For I am both a tree-climber (yes, at 37, still) and a beach lover. It is not the working my way up a rough trunk, finding toe-holds in knots and branches, but the […]

Camping in the Rubble

A cyclone threatened.  We knew the devastation it would leave in its wake would be enormous. As it began, we had no idea what the consequential damage would be, but we knew that it could not be stopped, and we had to wait until it had blown through before we’d know whether repair was going to be […]

That Wild Road

We were standing together on the southern slope when she showed me where the roof came clean off of her neighbor’s barn. Her own barn had lost just a bit of trim, she said. Though it did clock her mother-in-law on the shoulder as they came out to check on the animals. Still. They were blessed.  I had […]

Free Fall

  May 27, 2009. This is the day I learn I have cancer. Weird. I never thought I’d hear those words. I am still drowsy from anesthesia. The doctor just comes in, and she says, “Well, we thought it was hemorrhoids, but it’s not. It’s a tumor. It’s cancer.” Just like that. Now I am […]