It’s been two years since I quit the table— and the pew; since I’ve pinched the broken piece of bread between my fingers and dipped it in the crimson cup. The body and blood of Jesus, given for me . . . and promptly declined. At first, it wasn’t on purpose. (There was a global […]
The package of letters is staring me down. I finally took them out of their hiding place from my dining table chair. I couldn’t look at them the first couple of days, couldn’t acknowledge their existence. Tonight, I moved them into sight. I eye them warily while playing solitaire and listening to the second book […]
The magical, white fairy lights look almost friendly on this forest-dark night. There they are, wrapped around the cables swooping from one side of the rushing river to the other. And from those steel ropes hangs a suspension bridge—the bridge that stands between my little family and our cozy cabin on the far side of […]
I took a walk today and I looked up at the bright blue spring sky popping against bright green leaves on old oak trees and I cried because today my fourth child is eighteen months old, and WE ARE STILL HERE. Pandemic, homeschooling, batshit crazy world but here we are. Almost two and a half […]
If I asked you to describe 2020 in one word, what word would you choose? Pandemic? Chaos? Disappointment? Virtual? Social-distance? All of the above are apt descriptors for this merciless year but at least for me, they don’t quite capture it as succinctly as this one: powerlessness. I’ve felt incredibly powerless in the past ten […]
Maybe it’s the desperate hope that somehow the tide of the pandemic will finally turn and we’ll see a return to some semblance of the life we knew before. But I’ve been feeling the need to mark the days lately, to remember. As summer unofficially ended in the U.S. with Labor Day, I noticed something […]
We’re entering week seven of shelter-in-place here in Massachusetts. COVID-19 has hit us hard. The direct effects are visible in the obit section of the city paper (all 21 pages!) but also in the everyday lives of men, women, and children whose worlds have been turned upside down. My husband and I do pastoral care […]
Editor’s Note: Words fail, we find, in these extraordinary days. We stumble to enunciate this new life with them. Often, we have no words—even for God. Twenty writers and ministry leaders (Mudroom sisters included) joined together to offer theirs. The Pandemic Prayerbook: A Pray-at-Home Guide for the Corona Crisis is a collection of 30 prayers […]
The heaviness that settled over my chest that morning was as dense as my husband’s weighted blanket tangled around my feet. I kicked off the covers but the anxiety wouldn’t lift. It was one week into the Coronavirus crisis that had settled over our country like a dense fog. It started on a normal Thursday […]