The hummingbirds have flown south, but their work here is done. This is home. We’ve been eating and sleeping, crying and dancing in this 1920’s cottage for only a year and five months, but it has already started to feel like my second body. There is a hint of a threat that my family, too, […]
Category Archives: Devotionals
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul . . . Emily Dickinson I was struggling with contentment. The city felt crowded, scary, and full of sadness. My husband works hard to provide this lovely old home in a safe neighborhood, but I was having trouble being grateful. As usual, I was […]
“ . . . [W]e often cut out time with the one who created time so that we have more time.” – From Better Together: Connecting With God and Each Other (A Youth for Christ Devotional) A few weeks ago, my family said farewell to summer by visiting the mountains. As we drove north, through […]
It can happen beneath a starry sky, during a prayer of sincere thanks, upon hearing laughter spill from a tiny child, and almost always while watching the sun rise over the ocean: heaven draws near. I’ve been noticing the “thin places” all my life without having a name for them. While reading one of Shauna […]
Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful – but the old are more beautiful than the young.” – Walt Whitman I remember reading these words by Whitman for the first time a couple of years ago. As a thirty-six-year old mother, being neither very young nor very […]
When I was a child, The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, was my favorite book. In it, a country cottage endures trials (urban sprawl), only to be transported, in the end, to her former life in the paradise of the countryside. The problem with my girlhood love of this book is that it […]
“ ‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’ ” Luke 10: 41-42 Six months ago, my aunt sent me this beautiful collage card she made. Inside she wrote, […]
I Corinthians 13 is the famous “love chapter” of the Bible. Its poetry defines love in exquisite detail. I think Mark 10 deserves a similar designation: the “Jesus Loves Me” chapter. In it, right after we watch Jesus drawing the little children close and blessing them, we get to gaze at a person through Jesus’s […]
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 My five-year-old has been memorizing this verse this month, so it is written on the chalkboard near the breakfast table. This morning, as the rain gently hit the windowpanes, I read this verse with new eyes. Of course! That is why I have […]
In this New Year, I’ve been slow to step away from the warmth of Christmas into the open expanse of January. It is silly, really, how I think in patterns. I felt somehow safe in the year 2014, because the pattern of that year had been an uplifting one. Now, I am outside its familiar bookends. […]
A Children's Book World 