In 1994 I got a crazy idea.  I would drive from California to Michigan with only our eight-year-old son.  My one real fear was that we would get a flat tire somewhere.  But as we pulled off the freeway in Las Vegas the car in front of me got a blow-out, so I figured that he had gotten our flat, and ...

She had a conversation with a crow.
   He laughed at everything she said.
You wouldn’t define his affability
   as friendship, exactly,
nor would he seem unfriendly,
   despite a slightly ominous cackle--
he could be ridiculing her, I suppose,
   or he could find her hilariously funny.
As tedious as their e...

Lean and leaning,
   top-heavy with a mop
   of madly splaying frond hair,
regally towering above
   and swaying precipitously
   in the slightest tropical breeze
yet holding tenaciously as
   gales blow mighty--
   a miracle of strong fragility,
as wind and trees dance,
   ebb and flow
   in a divine choreogr...

We were so young.  We didn’t feel young, but I wasn’t quite 22.  We were launching on that big adventure called marriage, forty-eight years ago today.  Our wedding was a small affair in my mother’s home: only David’s immediate family and my extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles and grandmothe...

Every year on this day I remember my Grandma Mary.  Today would be her 128^th birthday.  Some years her birthday falls on Mother’s Day. Not so this year, but the date is still indelibly written on my heart. 

Grandma Mary had one child, my mom.  When my grandfather passed away in his sixties, Grandma...

Motherhood isn’t always the lovely and rewarding experience described by flowery greeting cards.  I know personally the challenges and even deep sadness that a mother goes through.  I suffered through one child’s learning disabilities and another’s life threatening autoimmune disease.  In addition, ...

Sing, aged turtle, as you rise
  from the depths of the ocean’s brine;
sing of the world’s primal onset,
  of time and times and half a time.

Sing, tiny seeds dropped in the soil
  amidst the charred remains of trees;
sing of rebirth, of green and spring
  carried along by bees and breeze.

 Sing, giant ...

haiku for Lori

         Unhinged by wind
like hair falling out in clumps
     advancing new growth

Liz McFadzean

The wonderful thing about our God is that he always had a “work-around” for sin.  His work-around is one perfect atoning sacrifice for my sin and the sin of the world.  

I’m pretty careful these days with the word sin in any instance except in the case of my own.   I’ve noticed that we humans are v...

At the beginning of Lent, I distinguished harmony from unison singing.  When I longed for harmony, I wasn’t longing for total agreement, but for a melody of multiple voices in tune with one another.  So here, near the end of Lent, I go back to a similar refrain—I am longing for peace. 

Peace isn’t ...