Every day this year I am learning resiliency. To snap back into place like so much worn out elastic, always pulled and stretched in so many conflicting directions, and my spring is gone. So often I live a stretched life of threadbare weariness, sagging at the seams where all the parts of me connect. I need the deep inhale of God each morning and then all day long as my days tread heavily and sway in a rhythm of the mundane, feeding children, teaching them, cleaning up, sneaking glances on …
Faith
Be Gentle with Yourself
I grieve every Christmas. I miss my father the most this time of year. He passed away right before Thanksgiving four years ago. The grief always seemed so out of place with Christmas fast approaching. But this year I know different. I believed it was somehow ungrateful to approach Christmas and the gift of a Savior and King with anything less than unbridled joy. It seemed cheap and flimsy to admit that in the merriment and festivities there was an ache and a void. It seemed wrong to say that …
When You Are Not Fine
“I don’t want to live like a vagrant anymore,” I pray. “I don’t want to be known for my lack, my weakness, my constant recurring despair.” I inhabit a limited soul longing for the wide expanse of eternity. Sometimes I wonder aloud, “How long, Lord? How long must I wait?” I first stood in line in the Walmart pharmacy to pick up my tiny orange bottle of pills that were prescribed like a life-line, a desperate measure I didn’t want to believe I needed even after the tears crashed down as I sat …
