I let a friend down. Or, I should say: I let *another friend* down. I can tell she’s mad, not yet hurt. Just mad. I receive her frustration with me, and my mind instinctively flashes to that old friend of a phrase: you just don’t get it. … I’m late. I ran a red light,...
(This might be an email to earmark and tuck away for the future, as this isn’t for everyone. Some of you are in the dream-forming years … as you need to be.) Is it time to bury the dream? Ouch. Nearly every set of eyes reading this sentence is connected to a heart...
I love (almost) everything about the turning of a calendar. Whether a new school year in August or a new calendar year in January, I drool at the thought of new pens and journals and other (both unnecessary and necessary) paper products. Last week I cleaned my desk...
A few instances in the past week left me feeling especially vulnerable: Disclosing some hard things to a friend, receiving pained words from a child, a new unknown surfacing in our future. Enough of these in a short period have me paying attention to how I respond to...
A tree doesn’t survive the winter without healthy roots. Neither do we. I remember that bleak February morning when my husband and I loaded up our car and drove through the stripped-bare forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains to move into my parents’ basement. Everything...
At sixteen it all seemed so obvious. You either had a cross around your neck and a Bible in your locker, or a drink in your hand on the weekends. Back then, it was follow Jesus or party. My best friend and I slid each other Bible verses on scraps of paper in between...