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 […]
A Heads Up When You’re Feeling Down
Looks like my sunflowers are having a hard day. Or week. Or month. Look at their heavy heads hanging low! Every year these Russian Giants break out from small seed buried a half-inch below crumbled earth mixed with composted horse manure. A great growing ground—fresh earth and the once icky! Within three months, stalks rocket […]
True Compassion That Helps The Hurting
O, Lord, the grieving are many! A wayward son, now beyond what the family can help. Another son can’t shake the depression but won’t take his medicine. Another son runs away from home leaving parents worried without information on his whereabouts. A husband gone to another woman’s bed, leaving his wife and young children […]
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 […]
Death and Birth the Whole Spectrum of Feelings
My first glance at Facebook today left me near breathless. One of my very good friends posted a picture of a baby—in black & white. It wasn’t any particular baby known to her. It was taken off the Internet—off some random site. But the status was very, very personal. The baby—the one conceived shortly after […]
Joy and Suffering
Each summer, it seems, the thunderclouds roll in, all dark and full from the west, ready to burst. And they do. They are hovering and the rains will pour, again. Each summer, I feel the heaviness of August afternoon heat and humidity beating down. Too soon, weeds seem to have grown three feet, I swear, […]
Coyote Ugly
The day was like any other. Except that it wasn’t. As usual, my morning ritual is to wake to a pot of fresh Starbucks Verona Roast, programmed to brew at precisely 5:00 so when I roll out of bed at 5:10 I don’t have to wait for my first sip of the new day. I […]
The Best Gift Ever
So here we are, days away from celebrating THE special delivery. And we’ve been lighting a new wax taper every Sunday this month—the first representing HOPE—the second, PEACE—and the third, JOY. And this morning in church, the fourth candle which represents LOVE—was touched with flame by a boy dressed as a magi. We watched the wick […]
The Muck and the Green
So yesterday’s post sent me spinning, whirling around like the cottonwood white I dodged while on my country road walk. “Nobody wants to hear from you,” came haunting from old mother-places left long ago. But when a new voice, the One who calls and your heart hears loud and clear what your ears can’t . […]
Up from the Ashes
I have Phoenix on my mind for two reasons. First, we’re going there. Fifteen days and counting. Second, I am one. I am a phoenix. In Egyptian mythology the phoenix was a bird that consumed itself with fire and, after 500 years, rose renewed from its ashes. I have not been literally consumed by fire […]
One Word
We sit straight across from each other in a chic café. And she begins to tell of the grief journey her heart has trod through these past two years. Two years? I have known her for sixteen. How can one woman go through so much and still love God so great? The years have taken […]
Period.
When loved ones leave fast at the hands of evil, there is still hope. Unspeakable grief. That’s what remains. I saw her face, the mother running to school, in bold black and white on the newspaper page. Her name, I don’t know—but my heart beats hard and is ripped open and bleeds anguished tears for her […]