Happy Valentine’s Day (and a guest post on the MOPS blog)
Most wonderful day of cut hearts and sweet treats and red and pink joy to you. I’ve been thinking lots about love this week like many of you, I’m sure, and the word that continues rolling right...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Beloved
Funny how a word can hit you new when you really stop to sit with it, let the letters and sound fall over a heart. Chip away a bit at its layers. Beloved. It’s always been one of my favorites, and...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: What mama did
Mama did empathy and compassion. Like breathing, that was what she did. Bending low, beautiful browns cresting tears, she’d say, “Oh, honey, that sounds so hard. How did that make you feel?” And you’d...
View ArticleThis circle
This circle is bigger than the circumference of these shoulders touching, these fingers scratching backs, these glasses of wine and red vines and smiles thrown from one side of the room to the other....
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Home
How can one write about home in just five minutes? For it is all that happens within these walls and all that we learn here that we carry throughout the earth. Home is where we figure out who we are...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Here
J doesn’t want to go. Though she usually looks forward to sleepovers with her grandma, this time she clings hard to my legs and looks longingly into my eyes. “I want to stay here with you,” she says....
View ArticlePermission to dream
Do you feel it rattling, stirring, thumping? Do you recognize it calling from the deep, across the din, through the echoes of these ordinary days? Do you watch as it runs across the hills and soars...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Friend
Alex and I at the Denver Airport She and I walked around the room at this holy reunion, and I hugged long and hard those I’d never met, but already knew. I squeezed them like I’d been waiting my whole...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Imagine
When I was a girl, it was Dotty and Topo and the Chocolate Pizza Factory. In her toddler years, Sici talked at length with pint-sized Sir — the one with springs for feet — and welcomed The Soccer...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Listen
It’s ironic that when we sat on those sticky bench seats, and you and I met face to face for the first time in that big van on the way to Mexico, it was I who listened to you for so many hours. As you...
View ArticleA Mother’s Fierce Love (31 Days of Right Here: Day 7)
Here’s my right here: I am a mother. I am a mother in pajamas — the only one awake in this quiet house, wearing an old fleece and warm socks to ward off the early cold. I am a mother woken early from...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Ordinary (31 Days of Right Here: Day 11)
“But if we more rightly understand that by faith we do not hold truths so much as we are held by Truth, then faith calls us into our experiences and is a way of being present to them, a way of...
View ArticleThe Date That Almost Wasn’t (31 Days of Right Here: Day 14)
We returned about 25 minutes ago from a long weekend with my sister and her family in Central Oregon. We feel full. From minestrone soup and brownies and nest building under the pine trees and running...
View ArticleTend This Seed (31 Days of Right Here: Day 21)
I see the whisper floating from lines. Letters strung “Tend this seed.” This gratitude seed, seed of seeing, seed of tiny graces and mercy — what Brennan Manning calls “the ministry of small things.”...
View ArticleWhat We Feel, How We See (31 Days of Right Here: Day 30)
You may have awakened this morning to the buzzing of an alarm clock, the sounds of the radio, a dull internal nudge. You may have felt dread for today’s might be’s, regret over yesterday’s failings....
View ArticlePower of the Blood
On this November 11th, I wake thinking of my father-in-law — my husband’s father, who I was just two months shy of meeting. The proudly full-blooded Irishman with the big voice and larger than life...
View ArticleGiving and Living Thanks
An idea board hangs on the door of the two- and three-year-old class at Lala’s preschool. At the top it reads, “What We Know About Clothes.” One line catches my attention: “Corduroy is kind of like...
View ArticleThe road ahead and home
I drive down the freeway at sixty, leaving behind me a gathering of women I’ve called mine for the last eleven years. I’ve said my good-byes and heard loving final words and looked in eyes and said,...
View ArticleFive Minute Friday: Encouragement
I am sitting in the dim light of my basement, a hole in the can above my head where the light bulb should be. I do not type away in full light this morning, but in the glow of this screen and the...
View ArticleIf God Is Real, Then… (A Guest Post at Lori Harris’ blog)
If you’d like to receive updates when I post new (usually 2-3 times a week), click here to like Draw Near on Facebook or subscribe along the sidebar. I’m so happy you’re here. ________ I’m honored...
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