Category: Faith

  • The Holy Deep

    My toddler boy hands me a rock and it is small, cool, smooth in my hand. “God made the rock,” he says, searching my face for confirmation, purpose. “Yes, sweetheart, God made the rock.” “And God made the berry,” he tells me, smashing a broken wild berry in my hand. “Yes, God made all the…

  • The Mother Next Door

    via It is a hot August afternoon when she takes her walk beneath the sun that bakes lawns and casts shadows through trees.  I watch her, my neighbor, everyday and wonder. Does she wonder about me? I would guess she was seventy years old the winter I was born; nearing one hundred this summer that…

  • On Baby Names {and why your name matters}

    There is a crescent moon on the silver night my husband and I lay face to face discussing baby names for our second child.  He smells like soap.  He is blue eyes and rough unshaven.  A breeze rolls through tree tops and our open window.  Cotton drapes shift. “James,” he says. “Too plain,” my first…

  • Dream Future

    via When I was a little girl, my sister Elizabeth and I made elaborate scrapbooks that we each titled our “Dream Future.”   We poured over the Sears and J.C. Penny Christmas catalogs, shopping not for toys and dolls but for the likeness of our future husbands and children.  We would each find our “dream guy”…

  • New Year, New Mercies and Fresh Snow

    Yesterday a new year dawned with a fresh blanket of white snow.  God’s mercies, like January, are brand new and yesterday grace fell like snow on this beach cottage of ours. I put decorations back in their boxes and set a dry and fading tree by the street and prayed “yes, this is January and all…

  • The Christmas Baby

    If you look at a pregnancy test long enough, turn it toward the light and squint your eyes, you can almost see that second pink line . . . even if it isn’t there. I am convinced there are two types of women in this world: (1) those who are nodding their heads in complete…

  • Tide Pools and Undertow

    Oh good, you are here!  I have been waiting for you . . .  here on the beach in South Carolina.  The beach is magical in the fall, when golden leaves find their way next to seashells and powdery sand.  Come and see the wonders of this place.  Sit with me, won’t you?  Lend your…

  • Little Girl Grown up

    This July, we bought our beach cottage in the small hometown where I spent my childhood.  I spent thirteen years away, growing into an adult.  Everything my child eyes once saw and knew here, that child, now returned, recognizes.  She remembers. Here, I am two versions of myself in the same five minute time span. …

  • Sisters and Sandbars at Sunset

    The summer that I was sixteen years old was the summer my sister and I stood on sandbars in Lake Michigan watching God paint sunsets in the sky.  Night after night, we jogged from our house, four miles, to the beach, with our bathing suits on underneath our clothes, timing our workouts so that we…

  • Almost.

    I sit writing and there is snow falling on the daffodils outside my window.  Thick damp flakes of winter’s last stand blow around a blooming forsythia.  “Really?” I ask the sky.  There is no response, only clouds which loom heavy.  Last week it was 70 degrees and I cleared winter debris from my garden while the baby and…