At about 3:45 AM I woke to find that I was too warm under the heavy down comforter. So I shuffled to the window and opened it to get some air flowing into the room. I then lay in the bed for the next 30 minutes trying to fall asleep but realizing that the sound […]
I smashed the back bumper of my nephew’s brand new Explorer today. It was…as you can imagine…a total accident. When we pulled over to get out of our cars, look at damage, and talk, Zachary was…Zachary. He was kind, extended grace, and was warm. He hugged me and did not do anything at all to […]
Like all parents, mine told conditional stories like… …You can date when you are 16. …When you are older, you can wear makeup. …You can buy that when you save enough money. But one of the ones that stuck with me was… …Big girls shouldn’t wear white jeans. So I never ever did. I have […]
I’m not a risk taker. I am instead a planner. I like order. Structure. I am not a big fan of ambiguity or uncertainty. I won’t blame everything on my childhood but let’s face it…kids who grow up in chaos tend to either gravitate to crazy amounts of chaos or rigid structure. And I have […]
On my worst nights, I lay in bed feeling like a single parent. Unable to sleep because I knew I didn’t have enough love in me to go around. God was the boundless love but for many people, God was the parent who had left. They still read about him in the Bible and sang […]
Freedom… The theme is Freedom. As in “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free…” (Galatians 5:1) Two lessons…one day…on freedom…that I have to prepare and deliver to a group of women, hungry to hear something fresh and new in their lives on one of the few weekends a year they get away […]
If asked about the journey so far, yesterday I might have said it has been solitary. Being the youngest of 5 children who somehow managed to be an “only child” for a good portion of her upbringing (because of age differences), left me a child in the midst of adults. Learning too much while too […]
I love God, whoever he is, and I’d really like to get closer to him. I’ve been thinking about how one of the simplest ways to get close to a woman is to be good to her children. To be kind and gentle and to pay close attention the things that make them gentle and […]
It’s complicated. Is that true for everyone? Does everyone have a complicated, difficult, delightful, hard, confusing relationship with their mother? No? Just me? I don’t believe you. I think mothers and mothering and daughters and daughtering is tough all around. Maybe tougher for some than others. But definitely complicated and definitely not simple. For instance… […]
We find out early that telling the whole truth makes people uncomfortable and is certainly not ladylike or likely to make us popular, so we learn to lie sweetly so that we can be loved. And when we figure out this system, we are split in tow: the public self, who says that right things […]