During recent months, I’ve had somewhat of a revelation about suffering. It seems that while suffering in our own bodies can and often does bolster our faith, seeing suffering in the bodies of those whom we love can actually serve to diminish our faith, if we allow it to. It is such a helpless and […]
An “Elders Matter”
In recent weeks, I’ve found myself struggling with comments or insinuations that I just can’t seem to shake off. These things that have been said or implied have been in reference to the part of our population that is the most vulnerable right now—our elders. It seems as if some of us might believe that […]
“Get Here” (please!)
Like so many other people around the world right now, within the past several weeks I got the call I’d been dreading—the call notifying me that that villainous virus that has invaded our world had made its way into the long-term nursing/care facility my mother was moved into last year; and then, after a few […]
“Grace”
A high school senior fixated on languages and literature, I’d just finished enacting the witch scene from Macbeth, the one in which a spell is cast; and as I was so very close to the end of my K-12 student career in our relatively small community, I’d acted that infamous scene out without inhibition—feigned accent, […]
The “Change” in His Pocket
It’s an interesting phenomenon really—how it just so happens that you bump into people whose story-lines you share, people who aren’t new to you, yet somehow you never really knew that part of their story, the part of it that mirrors your own, the part that they’ve tried to keep hidden deep down inside of […]
When We Don’t Hear “Sorry”
As I’ve contemplated for many weeks what type of blog post I would use to introduce my recently-completed writing project, said post came to me, as is typical, through an event most unexpected—an auto repair/disrepair. Less than one day after having my vehicle in the shop, I drove about 40 minutes away to a doctor’s […]
A Lion and Lamb Moment
Something rather astonishing occurred this week and it did so in my very own backyard while I was watching. As I accompanied our dog out onto our deck so that she could do her “business” in the yard, another little and unexpected creature caught my eye on the ground below us; and this little creature […]
A Weekend with “Jolly” Job
Though I very often yearn to never, ever remember that I went through a season with cancer, I receive occasional reminders of heavenly happenings that I’m just not sure would have come my way here through any other means. One such reminder came Friday via my dear friend and former chemo buddy, the Highway Padre […]
A Higher Love
As I watched part of an episode of a new T.V. drama recently, I heard in the background a beautiful and much slower rendition of a song that I vividly remember dancing around to when I was in high school—“Higher Love.” British musician Steve Winwood sang the song, with Chaka Khan in the background (super […]
Doors of Heaven (and hell)
Recently, I finished reading another of C.S. Lewis’ works—The Great Divorce. I had avoided this book for years as, like others perhaps, I had assumed the content was something other than what it is. The divide to which Lewis is referring in the title is actually that of Good versus evil, Heaven versus hell. What […]