cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
Shades of pink stretched across the horizon and the air was thick and warm. Mark and I had a plate of nachos between us and had chosen to sit outside despite the heat. Her text dropped onto my phone around 6 p.m., “Thinking of you today, and holding this day 18 years ago.” As I…
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“I’m dying. I don’t know how to do this!” Laying on the bed in the dark, these words played over and over in my mind. I had felt a little off for some time, but there was nothing I could put my finger on. My family urged me to go to the doctor, but what…
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Dear Job, Were the effects of your trauma immediately healed when you heard from God that day? Did your lamenting and honesty with Him protect you from PTSD?
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Every year I look forward to the passage from winter to spring. This year I hardly noticed it. During this year’s transition month, I was admitted to the hospital three times, each time sicker than the last. Surgery was the last option but the eventual outcome. Then ICU, then complications, and then, finally, I was…
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My two boys are playing LEGOs upstairs with their dad as I take a deep breath and inhale the cool air and quietness that permeates the downstairs. A question dances in my mind while my fingers delicately graze the spines of an ever-growing collection of cookbooks. What will I make tonight? I finally select the…
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I will never forget the based-on-a-true-story movie, The Impossible, about a family who, while vacationing in a paradise resort in Thailand, was hit by the 2004 tsunami. The scene that grips me most is when Naomi Watts is reading on a lounge chair and suddenly sensing something is not right. That something terribly powerful is…
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I have faced battles around and against me, but I daresay they feel puny compared to the global war raging inside of me. The battlefield of the mind, of my mind. Not fought on some far off foreign land, but a civil war, on home turf.
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I took my first quilting class last spring at a local fabric shop to learn the basics of quilting. Basics like learning to cut out and piece together squares with names like, “Log Cabin,” “Fence Rail,” etc. This winter I bravely decided to make a full-sized quilt on my own even though my knowledge of…
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Truth in love. I wait for you Not very patient Confused, battered, Ramming my way along.
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For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12 My friend Rita, a worship artist I adore came to encourage and speak to a small group of women…
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