If one’s not praying regularly, is it only because something else is regularly loved more than God?  ..read more

The snowball tree out at the mailbox is this flurry of flakes in the middle of June. So you can go out to get the mail and stand there with all these petals fall around your feet. You can realize: A year can evaporate before you know it. In the middle of all kinds culture of noise and outrage, where judgement can be be our dialect of choice and angry, finger pointing posts can go viral and sicken our communal well, you can just want to stop at the end of the lane and watch the sun for a moment over the fields. “The best way to live a good year is to do a reset halfway through the year ..read more

This week, as one of ours prepares to don a cap and tassle and graduate… as so many friends processing kids graduating, processing new seasons of life… I keep going back to this glorious moment in time & my heart explodes a bit &. this is like a soul compass… They made bubbles right out on the lawn at dusk. The best way to prepare for what’s ahead is to be present to what is now. As if you can lift and carry the thin skin of things. As if you can wait for the space between stillness and wind, and rise. Malakai, he wears faded jeans two inches too short, the hem just skimming the milk ..read more

Right about now is when it starts to get even harder to put one step in front of the other toward those hopes of yours. Because it’s now the second week of January. And the research says that “80% of people forget their resolutions by January 12,” and the health app Strava, analyzing more than 98.3 million uploaded data points, even goes far to dub January 19, just around the corner, “Quitter’s Day.” You don’t have to work to become someone better to get to be loved — you’re already loved, so you get to become the someone you were always made to be. And sure — there’s a part of you that does ..read more

The truth is, after a brutal couple of years, I have decided I do not simply believe in Jesus. I am done with that life. Mainly because it turned out to be guttingly empty and hollow  — and, frankly, not enough.   After years of navigating all kinds of personal heartbreak, and family trauma, and the whole lot of us living through global upheaval and political and cultural divisiveness and polarization, this is where I find myself landing:  I do not merely believe in Jesus, I live in Jesus. “I do not believe in Jesus, I live in Jesus.”  In this polarized war over what is t ..read more

W hy in the world is there such staggering suffering in this heartbreaking world?  It was four Lents ago now, that I’d been sleeping beside a hospital bed for 12 days, been sleeping alongside the brave 300 children curled and splayed in stacked floors of beds under the sign: Hospital for Sick Kids. Maybe what we need is more than good answers in the midst of suffering — what we need is good people  to walk through the suffering with us.  How many times had the hallways buzzed with Code Blue, Code Blue? How many times had a child’s cries and begging no’s seized us down these ha ..read more

So this turns out to be the tenderest relief in a wild season: There are just SIX Mondays from now and Christmas Eve. And when the holidays hit in a year like this? We’re all choosing holy days more than hyped-up days. “Holy days — over hyped-up holidays. Falling in love — over falling in debt. Wonder — over worry.” When the holidays hit this year, we’re all not choosing to fall more in debt because of consumerism, but we’re choosing to fall more in love because of Christ. When the holidays hit this year, we’re all not going to be hit by all the worry — we’re choosing to be hushed by all His ..read more

Some lean over gravestones and say:  The miracle didn’t happen. And others lean over gravestones and say they got their miracle because she was a miracle, and getting to love her was a wonder, and every moment together was a miracle of grace and there is no other was to explain the extraordinary that she was. Why in the blazes do some miracles happen and others don’t? My sister was killed, run over, in front of my mama and I, and I watched my wild Mama sob-rock her baby girl’s bleeding body in her own begging arms, and I have paced-prayed for rain while our live ..read more

Waiting for the right time, can feel like everything is going wrong. The sacrament of waiting can feel the hardest of all. You can bet on it these days, every morning when we rise and look at the calendar, we think: How long, Lord, how long? How long till parts of our story turn around, how long till our tender hearts mend, how long till there’s healing in a deeply fractured world, how long till we all get to breathe even a little bit easier? The sacrament of waiting can feel the hardest of all. They say waiting is the drumming of impatient fingers. Or the unbearably slow watching of the fa ..read more

W hen the woman reached out to hug me just before I got to the door, she whispered it in my ear and I barely heard it through what was leaking down her cheeks, “I don’t know if I’m going to live through this.” She pulled back and looked me in the eye: How do you keep taking one step after another — when you want to be on another road? “Maybe it’s — I just don’t know how — to live through this?” I read her eyes and she reads mine and how do you hear the voice of the Shepherd still calling your name when the lies from the pit keep calling you names, and you can’t breathe for the shame? How do ..read more