Archive for January 2013
Slip into Some Quiet
Thumb-sized snowflakes besiege us, flying from left to right across my windows, beauty on display. The wind changes, and they fall straight down in eerie silence. “In sequent toil, all forwards do contend,” Shakespeare would intone from Sonnet 60. “Put on some nature music, will you, Mom?” she asks, the gangly willowy daughter who has…
Read MoreWhat Every Man Craves
I watched him pound away on the drums at church yesterday, his shoulders rising rhythmically in a red striped dress shirt. Between measures, his left leg kept silent time. I prayed for strength and energy for him, knowing firsthand how influenza had stripped us of energy this week. Over the Sunday School hour, I sipped…
Read MoreWhat All Women Desperately Need
Coffee gurgles invitingly from the kitchen on my left, while jade plants hang low to the right of me, heavy with new growth. She came this week, on a night of icy rain. Glass image shards of her face flickered from corners of my glass-cut front door. “It’s hard to make friends sometimes,” she murmured…
Read MoreHow a Singing Surgeon Shapes my Marriage
Guitar chords squeak slightly as musician Chris Tomlin sings. Sips of creamy hot coffee slide smoothly down, warming a Minnesota January. We have been craving worship these days, my man and I. Clicking through praise songs on Youtube like addicts in rehab, desperate, hungry. Worship seems to be both the mirror and the balm. Words…
Read MoreForty Days Later (For You and for Me)
Forty days, a little over a month, of newborn snuggles and breastfeeding closeness… Forty days of blissful “Look how sweet he is!” interspersed with exhaustion and sleep-deprivation. Forty days of diapers, stolen naps, and fuzzy newborn kisses. And somehow in there, the couple probably checked out of their hotel stable, stood in long lines at…
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