“Someday we will point at our scars and tell the story.”

When this world brings pain, and grief, and suffering—Holy Spirit, hear their groans. May they remember the prayers of their youth. Would they remember the prayers of their mama. Finally, in their own threadbare and ‘too much’ seasons, turn to You even if all they can manage to utter is:

“Jesus, ow.”

Life with a toddler is hard. And saying so doesn’t make us ungrateful, it makes us human.

Yet, even in these trenches made up of laundry and snot trails, we somehow keep putting two feet on the floor in the dark of the early morning hours. Day after day, we put out our hands and lift their bed-headed, soggy bottoms from their crib and into the start of a new, long day.

So this is my ode to a crib. An inanimate object that became a great ally. This is my begrudging goodbye. A melodramatic clinging to wooden leg—

Parting is such sweet sorrow.⁣

⁣

I am not prone to doubt. ⁣

Prone to fear— sure.⁣

Prone to apathy— it comes and goes. ⁣

But, I’m not a doubter. A questioner—yes. I’m always questioning, but that isn’t the same as doubt.

I wonder if she will remember my hands. I think she will, if I will stop moving long enough to let her study.

Time will paint our hands with spots, swell our knuckles and smooth our hard earned calluses, but don’t underestimate their impact.

In this enormous palm in which we spin— stop the spiral long enough to memorize and be memorized.

These days of reckoning and mass decontruction make me miss my Dad. It makes me wonder what he would say— then again I know what he would say:

My young self-esteem clung to what I knew would work and be grown-up approved. I kept it safe, rather than reach into the risky abyss of my own creativity.

First Published in The DELIGHT issue of Joyful Life Magazine

“I want to be fearless. I want my children to take holy risks and to know the feeling of eternal invincibility, to walk with their chins held high into dominions of darkness and challenge the status quo because they are supernaturally secure in knowing that their souls are untouchable. I want them to breathe Abba Father into a world that believes itself orphaned.” 

Maybe instead of unity, we should all be praying for the courage and capacity to show the ungracious— grace.

Maybe we need to be as reckless with our grace as we’ve been with our words. 

Maybe we need to guard the humanity in others as fiercely as we’ve guarded our freedoms. 

Dissent. ⁣

I give you my blessing to dissent with all the fury you possess.⁣

⁣There are some things worth fighting for. ⁣

⁣So dig your beautiful heels in. ⁣

⁣

Sweet mama, you are not enough. ⁣⁣

You don’t have to be.⁣

You were never meant to be.⁣

“This is unreal to me because Jesus literally launched his ministry on a platform of anti-racism.”

If I draw inward I can tune in to its gentle nudge, even in the middle of the shouting match that has ensued around the woodpile. The deafening noise can easily drown out what is hushed and holy if we let it.

Mercy says that sometimes setting up camp in the wilderness of questions, is better than elbowing our way through the hordes of wrong answers.

It was April of 1992 and the Los Angeles riots were erupting in the blocks surrounding my house. Breathing in the smoke that enveloped our neighborhood, was painful to my nose and throat. My mom gave me a wet washcloth to hold over my face to act as a barrier.

Sometimes I wish I could lay out my collection of childhood memories in a long line. Perhaps seeing them end to end would allow me to fill in the in between. Every so often an in between is given to me, by a friend or family member. Mostly though, they are held in my mind’s eye— pieces of shadows.

Twinkle lights really aren’t competition for a sky full of stars. Really, they’re not. I’m talking about floods of stars, far from city lights, picking out Orion’s belt, crook in your neck—- sky full of stars. You can’t trust twinkle lights.

I had a dream last night that we were leaving on a trip, a retreat of some kind in a remote part of the woods somewhere. We were half way there having already spent some time in the car when I realized that I had forgotten to pack shoes. My feet were in their typical flimsy flip-flops, hardly conducive for tromping through the woods.

First Published on The Mudroom Blog

“Dust is the chosen medium of the Great Artist.

It was from dust that He formed his greatest work of art– a self- portrait that He gave breath and called good.

May the dust that envelopes the magic of my children’s early childhood bring with it a greater understanding of whose image each of them bears.”