Glory Hunting
I wake to the the sun streaming on my side of our bed. A new day. My first thoughts? A prayer formed from words in Lamentations about hope in the midst of affliction. Oh God, because of Your great love we are not consumed, for your compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great […]
The Power of Three
Three deaths. Three funerals. Three weeks. A trinity of holy. 35 years old. Husband. Father of three. Killed in a car crash. 62 years old. Friend. Sister of one of my best friends. Heart attack. 88 years old. Ministry partner for years. So how can such suffering, so close together, be holy? All are grieving, […]
A FAREWELL FOR JO (AND THE HOPE FOR US ALL)
My dear friend Nancy, my neighbor, lost her sister Jo Monday night. 62 years old. Vibrant wife, mother, grandmother, sister, friend. Heart attack. Alive in the morning. Gone by night. There’s agony here around this farm, this Holy Week, as we march to Maundy Thursday, the day our Lord wept in a garden as he […]
Some Thoughts on Dying When You Feel Like It and the Hope That Stops You
It is late September. The sugar maple is tinged with fire, a burning mix of orange and red and yellow, engulfing the green. Honking Vs of geese fly over the barn. One yellowed leaf curls on the grass. Three Sandhill cranes lift off alfalfa field, warbling their way into the air, a trinity created by […]
Ticked Off But Moving On
Tick. Tick. Tick. The time ticks off the clock. It’s 2 AM and the Florida moon is an illuminated sliver on its side. The screen bends the light into a cross slicing straight through the center. I want to grab that moon by the tail and swing as a child, my curls swaying along with […]
Dead Mouse
How to live like you’re dying . . . I found the body of a deceased mouse in our barn today. Alive and well one moment, in the feline fangs of death seconds later. Flat and gray, stretched out stiff on cold concrete, there he lay. Did the mouse think about how fragile life is […]