I used to think growth was like toughness. The longer I walk with the Lord, the tougher I will become—stronger, stouter, firmer. And I guess in some ways there’s truth in that. My grip on Scripture is firmer than it’s ever been, and my conviction that Jesus is the only way, truth, and life runs…
He
Twenty-five years ago, I bought my very first laptop. I had just started my junior year of college and was weary of camping out in the university computer lab to write papers and do research, so when I found a laptop on sale at Circuit City, I pooled all the money I’d saved working at…
Daleth
That year was the making of me. I’d never before been on the receiving end of such unabashed hatred and vitriol, though the haters and the vitriolics hadn’t necessarily aimed their weapons at me. I was married to the man they hated, making me a not-so-innocent bystander because I’d chosen to give my entire adult…
Old Love
When I saw them, I was in the orthopedist’s waiting room with my son who was getting a cast on his arm after an unfortunate backwards tumble from a swing. Quietly, I pointed her out to my son, “Look, she’s in a sling and a splint like you are. I wonder if she fell, too.”…
Gimel
I am a rule follower. Unlike most kids who seemed to feel pinched and fenced in by rules and regulations, I liked rules and boundaries while I was growing up. I like them now. Rules, I learned early on, could bring about a strange kind of freedom. If you know what the expectations are in…
Beth
I was in kindergarten the first time I memorized a Bible verse. In 1986, I lived in Memphis, and my parents had enrolled me in a small Christian school. The curriculum required all kindergarteners, even the half-dayers like me, to learn Psalm 23. In the King James Version, of course. I might have struggled with…
Aleph
I’m seven years old and there’s a note in my jeans pocket, a letter folded into a square. The laundry was left in a heap on the bathroom floor no doubt, but in the sorting and washing, my mother finds the note. She pulls it out, a last minute find before turning on the washing…
Praying About Praying
If I am ever feeling a kind of spiritual dissonance or distance from the Lord, I can almost always trace it to prayerlessness. Last fall, one of my kids asked me about prayer, afraid that he wasn’t “doing it right.” I walked through tenants of the Lord’s prayer from Matthew 6 as well as the…
When You Can’t Study the Bible, Do This Instead
There are some seasons of life when deep, regular Bible study isn’t feasible. Now, as someone who believes that studying Scripture is vital to our growth in Christ, even writing that statement feels awkward to me. Ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it, But the deeper I go into my forties, and…
Gratitude, Our Fence
Eighteen years ago, I planted a garden for the first and, as it turns out, the last time. My neighbor at the time, a retired landscaper, offered to till up a corner of my yard with his landscaping equipment. He must have had a lot of faith in my gardening abilities, as evidenced by the…