life, home, and hospitality
Please, God, let my parents come and beat her up. We’d had a sword battle with pencils, Patsi and I. And Mrs. Smith rapped my 7-year-old knuckles. But not Patsi’s. So I turned around and scribbled on Patsi’s picture. And now I stood in the corner, lump in throat, cheeks aflame. It didn’t occur to me that if my parents did come, I might be the one in trouble and not Mrs. Smith. I just wanted to go home. . . . when a home splits, it doesn’t create a sense of two new secure homes, but rather leaves a child feeling there is no home at all. Odd fears crop up, like the anxiety our important things could disappear at any moment–toys and other valued items.” ~God in the Yard, p. 112 My parents were married for 64 years, and I...
the finger of God
I see God’s creative finger in all seasons. But never more, I think, than in the spring when life unfurls. These are the days when all that glitters is green. Yet life is sometimes blood-tinged like the color of death in this new leaf. That also carries the color of hope. Because life is in the blood, and as long as there’s life, there’s hope. I’ve been thinking a lot about the “finger of God.” I’m sharing over at BibleDude today. It’s a little disjointed. But then so is life sometimes. I’d be honored if you’d join me there. Still...
still saturday: solitude
“But the inability to understand what creativeness there is in solitude, that it is somehow linked to the ‘madness of silence,’ is to deny the human spirit its vital recharge for facing the rigors of everyday life. “Solitude is choosing to be alone . . . “Solitude is to let the mind and emotions drain away, free from the demands of others. It is to commune with self, with the simplicities and beauty of nature. It is to let the mind wander, flitting here and there aimlessly, never locked into any great struggle to make closure . . . It is a time when the restless torments of a thousand emotional circuits are quieted, when there comes that ‘sweet peace’ that man must have to survive the jungle of his own...
in which my week spins and i center
I’m curled up with my cream-colored plush throw to read in preparation for a High Calling book club discussion, when my daughter-in-law calls. My son’s vertigo is back, and he’s begging to go to the emergency room. I sigh. Not again. When it happens, it happens out of the blue and keeps him down for a week. “Keep us posted,” we tell her. I try to focus on “A New Story for Work” and “the gospel and medicine” and how doctors sometimes tend to get lost in their profession and how we tend to idolize them. I remember how as student nurses we were required to give up our seat in the charting area if a doctor entered the station. My husband’s phone rings. “We need to go to the ER,” he tells me. Continuing the rest of this story over at...
five minute friday: fingers of fear
I crack my right eyeball. He’s up on his left elbow, leaning over me, staring… …at the clock, I guess, on the nightstand next to me. Then he’s fiddling with his phone. Did it go off? Or not? After I complained about the radio blasting strange music at weird hours and having to wake up and stretch so far across that I nearly fall out of bed, and then having to shake him awake, he took to setting his phone alarm. On vibrate. He lays it on the bed right between his Tempur-Neck and my soft feather. He hears feels it. I don’t. Go figure. Finally he gets out of bed, bumps the footboard in the dark, opens and closes a drawer. I count as he thumps downstairs. It’s 5:15. It’s cold. I burrow under the covers and...
how clutter makes us fat, and how to slow down to see
I went in search of the sound of scratching. I found it coming from behind the door of no admittance. From the room that used to be my sister-in-law’s bedroom until this house was moved across the field in the ’60s and the room was halved to accommodate a stairway to a full basement. My mother-in-law used it for storage, including scrapbooks and antique linens–many tagged as to their family roots, some tagged to be returned at her death to those who created them for her. I still have some of these. We stored things in that room, too, after we acquired the house. The space also morphed into a walk-in closet, a craft room, a nursery, and now again storage–ahem, clutter–cave. I called my husband. “Were you in the front room...
when you’re bare but not barren
I’m nestled under white down beneath slanted ceiling. I got the message on my phone. We’re under a wind advisory. I hear branches batter the roof and wonder if I should turn on the weather radio. My husband sleeps sound, snores soft. I’m in charge of safety. I slip on slippers and robe and tiptoe downstairs. I’m writing the rest of the story over at BibleDude.net today. Come? In the...
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April 19-21, 2013 (past but not forgotten)
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