I’ve long used January 1st as the day I’m going to get my life together. New diet? Clean slate starts on the first day of the new year. Exercise plan? I’ll begin on the first of the year. Keep the Tupperware cabinet from throwing plastic containers at me every time I open it? Organization will…
Heth
If you haven’t seen the M. Night Shyamalan movie, “The Village,” I’m about to spoil it for you. During the opening scenes, we think we’re watching a movie set in the late nineteenth century. We take a quick tour through a small village populated with families wearing antiquated clothing and doing chores without the help…
Zayin
How many times have I called your name in the night? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Sixteen thousand, five hundred and fifty-two nights of my life so far and on how many of them have I said your name in frustration or grief or fear or pain? ___ I’ve always been a bad sleeper. My…
Waw
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…