Mirror Lake shimmers in its craggy casement like a portal to another world. It begs a closer look, so we break from the trail and summit an obliging boulder. Our breathing slows to the rhythm of waves lapping up the muddy shoreline. A granite peak looms overhead. There’s a moonlike tranquility here that I’ve never […]
Seven Suggestions for Living a Creative Life
Do you consider yourself to be creative? You should. Poet Luci Shaw explains why: “We who believe we bear God’s image must realize that the image includes the capacity to imagine and create, because God is himself an imaginative Creator.” All day every day, every one of us relies on our creative capacities to resolve […]
This Is How I Talk to God
This Is How I Talk to God Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer. Psalms 19:14 NKJV Cru defines prayer as a way. . . to communicate with God. That can mean thanking Him, praising Him, confessing something […]
W(hole)
With summer in the rearview mirror, Christmas in the U.S. officially begins. I pretend to be disgusted with this premature nod to my favorite holiday. I may even roll my eyes and heave out a very audible sigh as I push past the seasonal aisle at Target (where green and red replaced sequins study pillows […]
Living in Memories
My husband no longer lives in the present with me. I don’t argue with him anymore as he prods me to remember the vivid details of a story he is telling. I engage with him and smile instead, building up our history even if it’s only in his head. In 2018, at the age of […]
How Looking Back Can Help Us to Move Forward
Our histories play an important role in our marriages, particularly when storms are raging. The twenty-one years that my husband and I had together served as ballast to keep us from capsizing during a string of tragic losses. We remembered how God helped us to forgive each other during our broken engagement. We remembered how […]
Harbinger of Memories
It’s the leaves. They’re the harbinger of autumn and they’re already dotting my green lawn red. My girl, she picked one up last week and greeted it. “You’re not welcome here!” she stated matter of factly as she deposited it into the dumpster. It’s not that we don’t love fall, we do. Both of us. […]
How We Remember Matters
When I was in my early 20s I had a few opportunities to go up in a small plane. Jets are fine, but have you been up in a small plane? I mean a real small plane that’s got you just feet above the cracked tarmac: A plane with windows you crank to open so […]
The Spiritual Practice of Remembering
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 […]
Encoding. Storage. Retrieval. (For the women who came before and after me, who make me who I am.)
With my whole heart I seek you; let me not wander from your commandments! I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me your statutes! With my lips I declare all the rules of your mouth. In the way of your […]
All That Remains
The two of them stand in the shadows—shoulder to shoulder, side by side. I gaze at their backsides, for their faces are fixed on the black and white images moving on the screen before them. I sense sadness in their shadows. I am very young, for as I reflect on the date it is November […]
Twisted
My high school mascot was a pretzel. I know. It gets worse. This—and middle-child status—explains a lot of my issues. On the upside, you won’t find my alma maters in the fray of mascot-related rhetoric lately making news. Ex: “You can eat us but you can’t beat us!” and rival schools trampling pretzels by the […]