It’s About Money, Except When It Isn’t
I’ve always had a tendency to let the mail pile up unopened (which means that we have realized, on more than one occasion, that we’re driving a car that may no longer be insured). We put systems in place. For instance, a basket for recycling junk mail sits by the front door just beneath a tray for bills. I vow to do a better job, but I...
A Poem (And a Pretty Picture) for Your Monday
The muscles in my legs have been achy and sore for two days. No, I didn’t go jogging (horror!). I spent most of Saturday rearranging my books, and it seems I vastly underestimated the after-effects of shuffling books from shelves to floor and back to different shelves. The big book shuffle was prompted by a single new bookcase. It...
Book of Quotations: Moonlight and the Memory of Pain
I keep a book of quotations. It looks exactly like any other journal, but it’s for a different kind of journaling. Journaling with the words of other writers, if you will. Here I scribble down quotations from all kinds of books: poetry, theology, memoir, literary theory, fiction, you name it. I write down anything I want to remember. ...
The Sweet Sound of “New”
I slumped down at my writing desk one recent morning, and this phrase floated up to the top of my mind: “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). I was feeling a little depressed, a little overwhelmed, and Solomon’s words came unbidden to justify my dark mood. For me, it was nothing more serious than hot weather, kids fighting...
Caught in Mid-Air on 9/11
I still have the airfare ticket stub marked September 11, 2001. Ten years ago, we didn’t use e-tickets. Also, there were no smartphones. This partially explains why it isn’t the images of destruction that have stuck with me (images we didn’t get a good look at for nearly a week). It's the voice of our pilot. We had just begun our...
To Make a Free Fall of Faith
I spent most of this Labor Day weekend sitting by the pool and feeling the spray of splash after splash after splash. My children don’t swim so much as hurl themselves repeatedly into the water. Even the two-year-old, with a grip on his inner tube that looks entirely too casual to me, gets in on the action. Run . . . jump . . . Splash! ...