I was sitting at a table with my sister, a younger friend, and four older ladies at the ladies’ Christmas party at my church, and being much more of a listener than a talker, I enjoyed hearing the older ladies swapping accounts of holiday life. There was talk of Thanksgiving and how their meals had … Continue reading Christmas Longing
It was the last day with my class that I had had for the whole year. We were out on the playground, enjoying the nice weather, when one of the little girls became so intent on getting up the ladder to the slide first that her sweet, innocent face contorted into a hideous expression of … Continue reading The Link between Discouragement and Motive
The first glimpse of Christmas comes thousands of years before the Lord Jesus came as a baby to the virgin Mary and her husband Joseph. Adam and Eve whom God had created in His image had just disobeyed God's one command--Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of the knowledge of good and … Continue reading The Necessity of Christmas
That Christmas comes at the end, in the final breaths of a wasting year, is best. After the muscle-ache of trekking graveside and back, graveside and back; after the haunting loneliness— of beauty-gazing and solo-missions, of incomprehensible party chatter, of home without its people; after the long war— the blitzkrieg of unrelenting lies, and the … Continue reading In the End
The sun rises every day and sets again. But when God dawns upon a soul, He turns His eyes into the darkness, and rests His gaze on the one and steps toward him purposefully, the glow of His glory pushing back the dark— slowly, steadily— as He prepares the way to the perfect moment. Then … Continue reading When God Dawns
Where has my faith flown? leaving me to the misery of godlessness when You are my own? And still You have shone like a mystery of lovingkindness that—can it be—I have never known? When were the seeds sown? Or have the vines of death, present from birth, slowly and deftly grown to choke and leave … Continue reading To Believe
For my friend, Frances, on her first birthday with Jesus Left alone with your memory— the fading image, the distant voice are not the wounds I thought they’d be for we are not so very far apart— Heaven has you, and I have Heaven in my heart.
I think we can all agree that 2020 hasn’t turned out to be the year we thought it would be. Who would have dreamed at the beginning of the year that so much would change? Even though I had heard of Covid-19 back in January, I never imagined how much it would affect our country. … Continue reading Coronavirus, Uncertainty, and Hope
The clench of pain, the darkness pressing; the future robbed, all longing wasted; the music quenched, the pleasure hollow; the loves in vain, the friendships fading; all losses sealed, the grief unbroken; all hope unknown, all roads unsteady; a failing breath, and death forever— if Jesus had not risen. .
All the hopes of wise men and of shepherds, all the dreams of captives in the night, all the longing of the generations— nailed upon a cross and crucified. All the years of watching and of praying, all the light of prophecies foretold, all the groaning of the earth, awaiting— wasted, poured out on the … Continue reading Song of Easter
Gratefully His 