Every year my heart pounds for our hometown Alpenfest Queen’s Pageant contestants during the impromptu question time. I still remember the question I drew when I ran a bazillion years back: “What does happiness mean to you?” I stammered an answer I’m sure was unintelligible. Afterwards, my mom told me I should have said something like, “Happiness means […]
Art Matters: Making Art
In her book, A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Were Made to Live Emily Freeman writes, You have the capacity to perform the human act of making art, of doing work that comes from deep within you and touches something deep within me. We make art with our lives. My friend, Carolyn, makes art […]
Could You Be Faithful To The End?
She was young, just a teen. He waved his weapon in her face. “Are you a Christian?” he hissed. She paused. Would she choose life or death? She straightened her shoulders, and her eyes locked on his. “Yes. Yes, I’m a Christian.” He pulled the trigger. It seems we hear stories like this more […]
Still Saturday: It Is Well
In the stillness at Laity Lodge, Sandy An InLinkz Link-up
Ebola and the Gift of No-Touch
God created us to connect. To comfort with contact. He even designed our skin with 2000 to 3000 touch receptors in each of our fingertips that trigger a cascade of chemicals when they’re stimulated. Touch decreases stress and anxiety, increases trust, builds disease resistance, and helps us connect to those we care for. Infants deprived touch fail to […]
New Skin
Note: In just five weeks, I’ll find myself next to the Frio River in the hill country of Texas when I attend The High Calling retreat at Laity Lodge. And oh how I need it as I’ve been going through a rather hard and hectic season. I need to be in this place with […]
Into His Presence
Note: In just five weeks, I’ll find myself next to the Frio River in the hill country of Texas when I attend The High Calling retreat at Laity Lodge. And oh how I need it as I’ve been going through a rather hard and hectic season. I need to be in this place with my […]
A Letter to My Younger Self
Dear You, Yes, you, stretched out there in that lawn chair behind the cement-deer-family-topped, moss-rose-planted mound. You with yet another book in your lap. You probably shouldn’t have burned that story, you know. But it’s okay. It’ll serve a lesson, and it’ll make a good story. Girl, you’re always going to love books. And […]
To My Mother: A Villanelle
This Making Manifest study has me combing my blog for poetry attempts, and I ran across this villanelle (my first and quite possibly my last) written in response to a December 2011 poetry prompt issued by The High Calling and Tweetspeak Poetry. I wrote it a month after my mother died, and it seems right to revisit it as […]
Sharing Your Faith When You Work at Home
It was one of those open-and-shut cases. The cancer sprawled through the belly. The surgeon had searched the cavity deep and wide and found no hope. He shook his head, took a few biopsies, and began the close. I’d dabbed the patient’s tears from the corners of her eyes and held her hand as […]
