Where to Find Rest
My father likes to say it’s a good thing our country isn’t any bigger. If it were, he jokes, our family would live even farther apart. It always makes us laugh. Then sigh. Because it’s painfully true. From western mountains to eastern beaches, southern swamps to midwestern plains, the members of our immediate family have spread across the...
Sweet Days
"When I am talking about food I am talking about life." Nigella Lawson I should be back in this space next week. In the meantime, it's all about the pool, the cousins, and the food....
A Desert Story
I’m a lover of stories. I’m a writer of stories. Increasingly, I understand my life and I understand my God through the lens of story. There’s one story I can’t escape (though I have often wished I could leave it behind or move past my need for it): the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert. This story is tribal: it’s about those...
Because Sometimes We Need a Song to Remind Us of What’s True
This is a familiar story (though I’ve never told it before). I’m sure you have your own version. It’s a story about how one song comes to represent something big: young love, say, or new parenthood, or that one particular summer when the weather just couldn’t be believed. It actually was summer, and, yes, the weather couldn’t be believed. The...
Book of Quotations: This Story is My Home
I love this photograph so much. It’s only a picture of my nephew and his stick at the edge of some woods. I think it is one of those pictures that reveals so much more than the sum of its parts: boy, stick, tree. I look at this picture, and I see fairy tales. Knights with swords as alive as they are. Wickedness that must be sought out...
Why I’m Singing a Song That May Not Be True
I have a picture in my mind, and I can’t seem to let it go. Maybe the picture has me and won’t let go. I honestly can’t tell which way it is. I see God’s children in Egypt in the moment before he rescues them. I see them just on the verge of being carried away toward their true home. They are standing, as God asked, with their cloaks...