On the day the moon eclipsed the sun, I happened to be with Jared in Arkansas, where spring had brought the dandelions a little sooner and where the bees were busy at their hives. I also happened to be near totality, where, in the big, southern sky, the sun dwindled to nothing more than a … Continue reading The Ninth Hour
Every word of yours proves true. So shore up my sides against it, lash me like water into it, cast me, body and soul, upon it, until a wet wind parts the mists, and I find myself beneath its steady, searching light. “The Scriptures in their own sphere are like God in the universe – … Continue reading Lighthouse
Before the sun slipped down on the Sabbath, Mary might have pressed aloe leaves and squeezed their gum into a dish, mixing it with myrrh and water. Carrying it to a buried Jesus at dawn must have felt like a last, little fragrant offering. But when she saw the sunrise streaming into an open tomb, … Continue reading Leaves of Healing
I watched one afternoon in October to see my neighbor’s chainsaw whir and whine and whistle clean through the trunk of his tree, and I felt the wrongness of it, as he stood on a ladder to dismantle it limb-by-limb. “I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in … Continue reading Upon the Death of a Bradford Pear
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of a woman named Mrs. Almira Todd, who lived in a clapboard house on the coast of Maine---a gardener and a landlady and "an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame." They grew out from her gray-shingled walls and up her steep gables, … Continue reading Scent on a Spring Breeze
My pastor said last Sunday that it's no mistake where we meet Jesus. I met him at the kitchen table, when I was still small enough to fit on my dad's lap. He had unlatched and pulled the two halves of the table apart, so there was a gap where the leaves might go. On … Continue reading At the Kitchen Table
We read Miss Twiggley’s Tree so many times that both covers tore off, including the final page of the book, which offered the moral of the story. But the last page I had was enough. It pictured the inside of Miss Twiggley’s house, tucked deep in the boughs of a willow tree, where the entire … Continue reading A Set Table in a Safe Tree
A True Story from Home Last February was gray and long, as the lean months before spring tend to be when winter feels old. But in my mailbox on Edgewood Road, there was something new: letters from Jared about what he hoped to plant in his garden that spring. He wrote of marigolds and tomatoes. … Continue reading When You Come Marchin’ Home
A good writer is one who recognizes that there is always more to the story than they're capable of telling. The world is vast, and they will never come to the end of it. John wrote his gospel with this humbly in mind. He had undertaken the formidable task of writing about his Rabbi and … Continue reading All the Books in Eldredge Public Library
There will probably never be an end to the stories pulled from the rubble of 9-11 --- stories of brave men who shouldered people in wheelchairs down a hundred flights of stairs, or ferrymen who swallowed smoke to sail crowds safely off the island, or a woman who kept her head and stayed on the … Continue reading Victory Cry
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