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Here’s what songs are on repeat:

Recipes That Will 100% Hit Our Table This Month:

• Peasant Bread

• Concord Grape Jam

• Roasted Butternut Squash and Spinach Lasagna

A Poem I Force My Children to Listen to:

Come, Little Leaves

by George Cooper (this poem is in the public domain)

" Come, little leaves, " said the wind one day,
" Come o'er the meadows with me and play;
Put on your dresses of red and gold,
For summer is gone and the days grow cold. "

Soon as the leaves heard the wind's loud call,
Down they came fluttering, one and all;
Over the brown fields they danced and flew,
Singing the glad little songs they knew.

" Cricket, good-by, we've been friends so long,
Little brook, sing us your farewell song;
Say you are sorry to see us go;
Ah, you will miss us, right well we know.

" Dear little lambs in your fleecy fold,
Mother will keep you from harm and cold;
Fondly we watched you in vale and glade,
Say, will you dream of our loving shade? "

Dancing and whirling, the little leaves went,
Winter had called them, and they were content;
Soon, fast asleep in their earthy beds,
The snow laid a coverlid over their heads.

A Poem I Love:

The Love of October - W. S. Merwin

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun.

What We’re Doing in the Garden:

• Harvesting the fall garden - carrots, greens, beans, sweet potatoes, green tomatoes, gourds, remaining pumpkins, and seed collecting, of course!

• Getting ready to plant garlic and shallots at the end of the month! I usually aim to plant between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

• And Why We Won’t Be Cleaning Up the Garden Until Spring
  

Here I am, blowing the dust off of this website, seeing as how the last post I made here was in October 2020. A year of thoughts, writings, painting, poetry, parenting, marriage, beautiful memories, late-night tears, off-screen work, and real-life digging has found me a year later on this website with something new spinning in my mind.

I want to try something new. I hope you’ll have grace with me as I figure out how this will work but I’m a bundle of ideas, and I am not one to take my time jumping into inspiration.

I’ve continued to write and most of it has ended up as lengthy Instagram captions, run-on sentences in a Google Doc, or it’s buried in the tanned pages of my journal. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years stretching my time, my energy, my skills, my ideas. I’ve found my arms full of words, poetry, gardens, vintage items, watercolors, recipes, chicken feathers, and maybe even my thin sanity at times. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to create and think and dream, and I’ve wanted to find a way to share all of that. And I think I have the early simmering of how I want to bring that to you.

When Jed and I moved into this house only 4 years ago, we started gutting the interior, spackling up old cracked walls, tilling the fallow ground, and we began making this 120 year old farmhouse a home. We live in lake country, which means it’s incredibly flat. For two kids who grew up in the shadow of the mountains, (Jed in the Green Mountains of Vermont, and me somewhere between the Catskills and the Adirondacks), we sorely miss the rise of the horizon in every direction. But this little old farmhouse is on a tiny little hill just outside of the city. It’s just high enough to get longer sunsets, a slight view, and wild whipping winds in February. 

Not longer after we moved in, I hung a quote from Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” on our kitchen wall. 

“His house was house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley."

We named this little two-acre plot “Cnoc Tearmann” (pronounced knock tear-mon) which means (in Irish) “Sanctuary Hill.” We wanted our home to feel safe. To be a haven of beauty and grace and truth. To cultivate life and all of the good things the Lord has given us. We want it to be a home where the Gospel thrives, not just for our family, but for anyone who sits with us in the messy in-between of construction projects, raising kids, and living life. We want it to be a place where when anyone stepped inside here or brushed shoulders with this place, they’d breathe a good and easy sigh, and feel that “evil things do not come into that valley.” 

So this has become our moniker and my hope as I continue to write and create. I opened an Etsy shop under this name and for awhile we were tracking our house renovations under this name. 

I thought I’d start to share some of this work “food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all” with you.

Here’s my hope —

Every month, I’ll share poetry, some that I’ve written and some that I love. 

Recipes that hit our table frequently enough that I no longer need to look at them.

Writers who find their way to our hearts. 

Paintings I create. Garden seeds, tips, and ideas. 

Ramblings and questions and friends who I love.

Discount codes and sneak peeks to the Etsy shop, vintage items, things I create, and the things my family builds.

And continued, as usual, the raw feelings I have about how much I love Jesus, the gospel, the work of digging in to the ground we’re planted in. 

I want to do this well, so I won’t promise you a weekly post. But I do promise that every time I sit to write, post, or share, it will be from this grove the Lord has given us. And as long as I have breath in my lungs, I want you to feel at peace here just as if you were coming to my house for dinner, and to know that an extension of my home is this little corner of the internet. While the world thrashes and rages, and some dig bunkers and stack their shelves for the apocalypse, I’ll try to keep sharing the good good things from this little knoll. This little viewpoint. This little sanctuary hill.

I have my hands full of love-in-a-puff seed pods. They’re magical little lanterns, once green and now brown, filled with three or four seeds with tiny white hearts on them. I can only assume that’s why they’re called love-in-a-puff. It doesn’t really matter right now, as I’m creating the first path of the day through the morning dew from the garden. The sun isn’t yet above the tree line. Its golden rays are hitting the leaves just right. Yellow, red, rust, auburn. They’re all chattering a bit in the branches above me. The chickens are skittering around in the garden, freshly fed, a new morning, no agenda but to eat and lay. A large, lumbering flatbed semi-truck barrels by with crates and crates nearly overflowing with orange pumpkins. Headed to the city, I’m sure. To the grocery stores, the pop-up pumpkin patches, the markets that supply the front porch and jack o'lantern decor. A wedge of geese fly overhead, the typical V-formation is a gray silhouette against the early morning sky. They’re honking their way directly...southwest. Yes. That’s the way, I mumble to myself.

I know the world feels like it’s in upheaval right now. I know, in both private and public ways, how we all feel sideways, waiting for the waves to set us back upright again. I feel this as I walk toward the house, whispering to myself as the day begins.

It’s the dishes, that’s what I initially thought. If I can stay on top of washing all of the dishes, wistfully hoping that one day we’ll have a dishwasher, then maybe I’ll feel better.

But then it was the laundry. Every day, new load in, out, folded, away. 
No it was the meal planning. Now three full meals for everyone, every day of the week.
It was the garden. Once fall comes, it will slow down, I thought.
No the dog hair that seems to reappear in the corners by the hour.
The e-mails.
The text messages.
The zoom calls.
Not enough sleep.
The budget.
The lack of childcare.
My husband’s increased workload.
The barn that needs repair.
The car that broke down.
The school curriculum.
Homeschooling.
The new schedule.
The overwhelming sense of personal failure.
The friend’s marriage falling apart.
The bad news.
The friends who we don’t see anymore. 
The bad prognosis.
The friends who are no longer with us. 
Election season.
Covid spikes and warnings.
Red zones.
Racial tensions.
News headlines.
Social media.

It’s all of it. 

And so this morning, like every morning lately, on the short walk to and from the chicken house, with the morning dew and early sun, I throw my heart into the arms of Christ. 

It’s you. That’s it.

This is what I repeat at night when the sun sets, the children settle into bed, the darkness lays onto the ground. Into the arms of Christ I send my heart running. You’re it. I have all my eggs in this basket. I’m banking on you. To whom else shall we go? What else do we have? What other hope can we anchor ourselves to? Nothing, no one. I have no back-up plan. No other answers. No better arguments. I don’t know enough to know how to wax poetic about politics, policies, or all that’s happening in our world.

The older I get, the more I realize that all of life passes like sand through my hands. I am seeing more and more that just getting to Heaven isn’t the goal; knowing and beholding Christ is. Only Jesus, who spoke Creation into order, who gave life to light and who laid down in the darkness, only to rise again, is unchanging, unshifting. He brings no wringing hands, no anxiety, no questions. Only Jesus, that’s it. I think these are the words that will be my repetitious anthem throughout the rest of my life. As I realize the question in John 6:68 “Lord, to whom shall we go?” isn’t said in sarcasm but in resolute desperation. Lord, we have nowhere else.

So I’m watching the geese, watching the world pass, watching the sand trickle through my hands. I’m doing no extraordinary things and I only know the prayers that bring my heavy feet, one foot in front of the other, to and from the house each morning. I have my hands full of love-in-a-puff seed pods. Small seeds marked with love, in the grip of the gardener, heading into winter in capable hands.

“Unacceptably high risk,” is what my doctor told me. When New York was slowly reopening, the latest COVID studies told people like me (I’m high risk because of a non-curable kidney disease that also affects my liver which all was a genetic mutation at birth) to continue to stay home. I asked my doctor if there was a chance it was overblown, if I was ok to resume “normal” things, and if there was a way to walk in wisdom and not just fear. 

She had no real answer. She told me to be in it for the long haul. To assess the risk of every outing. To consider who I want to see, and who I won’t see for awhile. 

And so, while it feels like everyone else’s life has resumed some normalcy, I feel stuck in Groundhog Day. Maybe it’s that familiar fear of “Is everyone hanging out without me?” and the reality is, yes. Yes, they are. 

My days move molasses slow. Even with two kids and homeschooling and gardening and emailing and preserving, I still feel like I’m in a time warp. To be totally honest, it’s hard to not slip into a depression. The kind that no one notices because who is around to see it? The kind that can be covered up with exclamation points and gifs in a text. The kind that doesn’t have words to match it. Just a hollowness that carves out the joy when I’m not paying attention. 

And for what it’s worth, social media doesn’t help much either, does it? Between a world of hate and anger, grief and death, national headlines and private stories of loss, it’s a continual reminder that what we’re all “returning to” isn’t always beautiful either. I see the posts from people who say that COVID only seems to affect those with underlying conditions, “...so what’s the big deal?” I see those words and push back against the diseased organs in my own body, the ones that have decent function right now but COVID could kick them over the cliff edge and I wonder if that’s all I am to people. Just someone with underlying conditions. A likely statistic. “She was going to die anyway. She had underlying conditions.”

So I take those thoughts in tears to the Lord. To my husband. To the garden where the tiniest gourds grow on vines, surviving the scourge of squash beetles and powdery mildew. If they can outlast the disease, maybe I can too. Even if the risk is unacceptably high. Maybe the bigger battle I have here is against fear itself. 

I haven’t returned to church. I haven’t been back to the office. We’re homeschooling which means no school pick ups, drop offs. No more days of childcare so I can go work or write. Cancelled speaking engagements. The same day in and out. 

But also the daily dose of the same beautiful faces who I get to serve every day. New recipes. A garden full of growth. Music at 6am with coffee. No rush. Singing with my husband at 10pm with a little whiskey in a tea cup. Simple ease. Seeds collected from dried flower heads. Herbs hanging from the ceiling. Tinctures soaking in the cupboard. Lavender and sage and eucalyptus. Nina Simone and Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters. Beeswax candles and chocolate chip cookies and fresh sheets out of the dryer. I certainly feel pressed, but not crushed. Losing parts of myself and who I wanted to be and also finding new pages, places where the Lord is pushing and pruning and working as the ever-faithful gardener He is. 

I know we’re all in different places throughout all of this. I guess I just wanted you to know that if you’re waking up at 4am in a panic, or crying at home at 8pm on a Friday night, or if you’re not sure what’s next and that terrifies you too, I get it. I think we all need to remind each other that no one is handling any of this perfectly. Give grace like daily bread and seek grace like living water. 

I stretch my cold feet across the bed to yours
The distance only inches 
But today we’ll rise again to the same routine, the same distance from
family, friends, the normal that 
slipped away 
when we were falling asleep

I never imagined that we’d be home
All of us here, working, eating, dreaming
The days stretching on 
Threads of gold tied to the steam rise of coffee each morning
strung up to the lemon sky 
tucked under lake storm clouds by dusk

We are far from the hum of Saturdays at the market
Sundays before the throne
Tuesday mornings at the coffee shop
Thursday nights with a house full and dishes clattering 
and cars lining the edges of our field

Maybe if we could see the way hymns rise from our lips
and prayers around the table
Early morning worship 
and the pleas I make on my knees in the garden
How they’re all woven together with the body
Wherever the body is these days

With every day that passes, 
what was slips further and further into
the shadowed corners of memory
and so I stretch my cold feet across the bed to yours

A reminder that your warmth is mine to share
as we are together in this solitude. 

I don’t remember the argument. I don’t remember what set my heart on edge against my own husband. Isn’t it funny how in the moment, those things feel like the biggest things but now, weeks, months later, I don’t remember the actions, words, feelings that had me seething with anger and emotion. 

But I remember the teary phone call I made while I drove to work. We each had gone our separate ways. He dropped our girl off at middle school. I drove the winding roads with our three-year-old to my mother’s house where I’d leave him for the day while I worked. I hated the lack of peace between us and yet I was still unreasonably upset. I called him without a plan. Without a resolution but really just wanted him to know I was sorry for making the morning so difficult. 

I cried, knowing I was still upset, knowing we didn’t have an answer yet. “I’m so sorry,” I sniffled while the cornfield passed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We’ll figure it out, right? We’ll be ok?”

He was calm, steady. “Of course babe,” he said from the other end of the line. “We have the rest of our lives to figure this out. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in this for life.” 

---

I’m in my second marriage, as you well know. The first erupted and ended badly. Fire and ice, pain and betrayal, sin and brokenness. All of the things that steal from a home instead of sustain it. And as much as I hate to admit it, even 5 years into my marriage to my husband now, I still fear that one day I will do the thing that sends him running. I will say something, complain about something, look a certain way, not fit into a certain size, and he’ll shrug his shoulders and murmur something that I’ve heard before.

“I never loved you. I don’t even remember promising to stay with you at that altar. I have no interest in being your husband anymore. I want out.”

I know that healing never follows the same timeline as pain. We all know one moment of heartbreak doesn’t take one moment of healing. One brief action of devastating abuse is not undone in a few minutes of peace. The emotional car wreck of a divorce obviously still lingers in my peripheral now, 10 years later. Maybe that makes me weak, or too driven by emotion. Whatever it is, I know the Lord isn’t finished overturning those rocks and gently leaning in to fix and restore the shattered edges of who I am. 

He does it in moments when the wind is blowing the fresh snow across the country roads and my husband says “We have the rest of our lives.” I think of us, Lord willing, 80, 90 years old, slightly hunched and still figuring it out. That would be a tremendous gift of grace. 

Remarriage doesn’t solve the pain of divorce. There is no person who can cure or heal the after-effects of such covenantal failure. Except for Christ, who no doubt was with me when I woke every morning with my heart on edge and said words to Him that were messy and broken. When I cried, “Lord, I’m trying to figure this out” and he’d remind me that He was in this for life. That nothing could take me out of his hand. That he would keep me.

So when my husband said these words, my heart remembered what faithfulness sounds like and it wasn’t just romance or empty promises but the echoes of the kind of love that doesn’t falter under pressure but rises up under it. We have the rest of our lives and somehow that makes marriage the easiest thing. It doesn’t scare me and it doesn’t make me uneasy. I know we’re still babies in this thing. Five years of marriage means we’re just kids and we haven’t been fully tested by the gauntlet of life, but something about the even keel nature of commitment has my heart at rest. Marriage is no ball and chain but the deep breath of patience and long-suffering that says by God’s grace, we’ll figure it out. We won’t grin and bear it. We’ll cry and apologize and try again. We won’t claim to have found any secrets or methods that are foolproof. We’ll walk the long road to our final home until one day one of us says goodbye to other, knowing we had many country roads, many frustrating phone calls, a lot of imperfect apologies, and that we were in it for life.

Our church is booming with new life. Pregnancy announcements, baby showers, meal trains, the tiny cries of newborns in all of the rows. Just this past Sunday, the telltale signs of parenthood were everywhere. Parents bouncing their newborn on their hip while chasing a toddler, a few moms who walk the nervous pace between the auditorium doors and the nursery doors, waiting to hear if there’s a cry, a dad walking the hallway with a curious 6-month-old overlooking his shoulder. But there’s nothing like that look on the face of a new mother who has just handed her newborn over to the nursery volunteer for the first time. The unease, the guilt, the exhaustion. I know it well because I’ve been there and wondered if I could go take a nap instead of listening to the sermon.

So if I could write a note to those new parents who walk in and out of Sunday services, here’s what I would say.

Well, hi. 

What a beautiful joy. You made it here to the wondrous world of being a parent. Heads up: None of us really know what we’re doing. Parenthood, as I’m sure you’ve heard, has no how-to book. We’re all winging it to a certain degree. Most of us hope we’re doing right by them. That in 5, 10, 20 years we’ll find out that the worst moments weren’t as bad as they could’ve been. 

What a gift you have in your hands and really, the best is still ahead of you. There’s no “Just wait until…” God’s grace will equip you for each new season, even if his grace simply equips you to fall to your knees.

You will quickly learn, if you haven’t already, what it’s like to love someone so much it literally makes your heart feel like it could shatter into a million pieces. It’s frightening sometimes. You will long for a moment of rest but miss them while they sleep. You will wait for a free moment to not worry about them but then check to see if they’re breathing every 30 minutes. (A mirror under their nose if you’re looking for a neurotic pro-tip.) You will know intimately every smile, noise, cry, and laugh. You’ll know the difference between cries. (And trust me, there’s a difference.)

And you will know that parenting is incredibly hard. It’s hard on your body, your mind, your marriage, your routine, your schedule, your work, your everything. As much as everyone tells you to enjoy these moments, savor these days, the days are long but the years are short, and rock those babies because babies don’t keep, I’m also here to tell you this —

It’s ok to say it’s hard. 

You’re not a bad parent for feeling like you’re going to lose your mind at 3 am if you don’t get some sleep. You’re not a failure for crying while you’re breastfeeding, for missing “regular life,” for wishing your baby would just let you sit and breathe for a little bit. 

It’s ok to not know when you want to have sex again. It’s ok to just want a shower and silence. It’s ok to want a nap and also want to return to normalcy and see other adults.

Not long after my second was born, there was a day when I called my husband at work in tears. “I haven’t done any dishes. I haven’t cleaned anything. No laundry. The house is a mess. I’m losing my mind. He won’t let me leave him. He just wants to nurse and for me to hold him and I think I’m going to lose my mind.”

My husband, the ever-present sage of wisdom in my life reminded me of this: “This is your job right now: be with him. Feed him, hold him, take care of him. Nothing else is your job right now. Just be with him. I don’t expect anything else from you.”

Burden lifted. Crisis averted. I needed the reminder that I couldn’t do it all and that was ok. Remind yourself of this. 

It’s ok to not know how you’re going to do it. It’s ok that you don’t love it all the time. It’s ok that you want some space and sanity and sleep.

Even more so, tell someone. Tell your spouse, your mom, your friend. Tell another mom who has had kids because she’ll know. She’ll nod and probably not say much else because she knows that advice isn’t always the need. Sometimes you just need someone to say “I get it. That’s normal.” Tell another dad because he’ll get it. He’ll know what it feels like to watch your wife change, suffer, struggle, cry, and not know how to help her because you yourself are exhausted and worn out. 

Remember that Jesus showed up in this world as a baby. He valued infancy and the value of their lives and humanity so much that he lived part of his God-man life as a dependent newborn, as an energetic toddler. He didn’t bypass those days and show up as a 10-year-old.

These are not wasted years. These are not throw-away days. Your baby is not part-human, part-valuable. Contribution to society doesn’t equal value so you get to model the love built into the Gospel to them right now. Love doesn’t demand performance. Grace doesn’t require best behavior. Sustaining a life doesn’t require them to give back. Look at that. The Gospel modeling itself right there in your arms.

So here’s your job — love that kid. Love them by being there. Love them by taking care of yourself too. Love them by taking naps and slowing down. Love them by knowing when you can’t do it all. Love them by asking for help. Love them by taking a deep breath in the shower when you’re finally alone. Love them by going out on dates and leaving them with a babysitter. Love them by paying attention — to them and yourself.

It’s ok to say it’s hard. From all of us parents to all of you, we see you. You’ve got this. Oh, and there’s probably spit-up on your shoulder. Just a heads up.

“Can I be honest?” she turned in the front passenger seat to face me. Her vanilla chai swirled in a cup and she smirked a little. “I honestly don’t know if it’s ok for a daughter to even say this to her mother…”

“Whatever you need to say, I can take it,” I tell her. Surely whatever she’s about to say won’t be any more cutting than the words I’ve said to myself in my own head. 

“I’m...disappointed in you,” she half-smiles, filled with the awkwardness and discomfort of a child and a young woman who knows that she’s about to speak truth to her own mother. She twists her straw in the chai again before speaking. It squeaks against the plastic, filling the silence of the car. “You should’ve known better.” 

--

I sat at the table the other night and recounted my story again to a friend. All of the messy bits and pieces. Some things I haven’t thought about in years. Other parts that feel as raw and real as a few weeks ago. This has become a normal practice for me. I do what I can to not hide anything. The amazingness of the Gospel is only shown to be more beautiful by the contrast of the wretches it saves like me.

Yet, even still, there are parts of my story that are not fully mine. They also belong to my daughter. This past fall I shared my story very openly on a few podcasts (which I’ll link below) and we realized that maybe it was time for her to know what is mine to own. So one autumn evening, she and I took a meandering drive into the city, stopped for drinks at a coffee shop, and then I took the long way home so we could listen to the episodes together. Nevermind the awkwardness of listening to my own recorded voice. This was my own recorded voice recounting major missteps in my past as she held a notebook open on her lap. I had told her she could ask anything. She could be mad about anything. She could be sad about anything. There was nothing she couldn’t ask. She scribbled away while we listened. Pages worth of notes and questions. Farmlands stretched and the night settled on the October landscape while I turned on to whatever road I could to make our way back home. How fitting, I thought. The wandering path that eventually leads home. 

By the time we pulled into our driveway and parked under the light of the big red barn, she was ready to start talking. Good questions. Real ones. Clarifying ones. Questions that required humility on my end and some that cleared some things up for her.

Years ago, this story was spinning in the hands of agents and publishers. Once upon a time, it was a full-blown book proposal. Video and all. My agent at the time had shopped it and for a myriad of reasons, it never took flight.

“It’s too sad,” one publisher said. 

“We’ve already filled our slot for a story like this,” another said. 

“You need a bigger platform,” my then-agent suggested. 

And then my now-husband asked me on a date. On a warm summer night, we went from a four-year friendship to more and a few months later, on a snowy hillside in Vermont, he asked me to marry him. Suddenly the notion of writing a book about my mess and former marriage and repentance seemed...less than ideal. So I tabled it. (Or, I shot it in the head. Time will tell.) The timing was wrong. I wasn’t ready. God said no. All of the reasons are mostly irrelevant because this past fall, while sitting in the front seat of my car, I realized how immensely grateful I was that there isn’t a book floating around out there with this story that she hadn’t heard. This story is also partly her story. 

Maybe the concept will someday land on some publisher’s desk again. Maybe not. That’s not really the point. The point is that a story is never really finished, is it? And the perceived failure of a project which I thought would cement my career was really just the mercy and kindness of God to keep me from blabbering on too much, too soon. God gave me failure in a project to protect me from failure in my relationships. This is a greater gift. This is a kinder provision.

He knew I’d need the sanctity of a car ride with my 11-year-old. He knew she’d need the space to process and ask questions. He knew she’d be disappointed and that we’d have to do some relational work to let him heal that. A publishing deal wouldn’t be the answer. Grace and time would be.

So all this to say, humility is underrated, God’s timing is reliable, and our kids don’t need us to be perfect. God is never done restoring and redeeming. It might take years. It might not be over when you think it is. Who knows – I may have more long car rides in my future. I may have more failed book deals that leave me scratching my head. I may have more hidden provisions of God. This is the meandering path that leads us home by his grace. Somehow all of those twists and turns lead us exactly where he wants to be.

—

Episode 84 | Kindled with Haley Williams | An Affair Redeemed

By Faith with Christine Hoover | What Repentance Looks Like After Adultery

It’s a new year. 

At 12:53 am, we are driving the dark roads home after celebrating with friends. The last remains of Christmas still swing from most front porches, shining out from living room windows, twinkling on the snow that must have fallen while we drank champagne and kissed our children’s faces. But now the world is dark and quiet as the road curves through old farmland and dusted white pine lanes. Christmas is just an echoing, fading refrain now, washing out into the hills and horizon. Like a familiar hum of "Auld Lang Syne,” we all know how to do this transition from one year to the next, and all of creation steadies on in the normal rhythms. And I? I look eagerly for home. I look for our back porch, twinkle lights hanging loosely, albeit some of them burned out. The one kitchen light on the countertop. The icy puddle splashes as we pull down our drive as tall pine dances slowly in the post-midnight wind. We pull our weary bodies out of the warm car and slowly make our way toward the house. Heavy footsteps through mud, arms full of food we didn’t eat, tired children complaining, footprints in the snow all the way to that warm glow of the back porch, the warm kitchen, the place where we can rest our heads on pillows and under downy blankets.

And something about all of this reminds me of the gospel. Of this new year. Of where I fit in all of it. Because so often this world feels like a dark, ancient landscape. It feels a lot like a winter where Christmas is just an echo and what remains dangles lazily from porches or old street lamps. Forgotten words to an old song that stirs nostalgia in us but we’re not quite sure what for. Where we remember that once there was a song, but now we only know what it maybe used to sound like but can’t quite hum the tune the same way as we used to. A new year on a dark landscape where we stumble in the dark and feign our way toward what we think is enlightenment and progress but really is just another hillside of snow. Here in the dark winter, everyone is fumbling for light. Everyone needs a place to lay their head. Everyone longs to come home. And yet we fill our wandering days with emptiness and are no closer to the place our hearts know we are longing for. Culture rolls on with the same brokenness, the same wheel ruts, the same bare trees, and we are no closer to our goal. There is no new thought, idea, or revelation that illuminates this new year, this land, these old roads that we know so well.

None like the one of Christ, the giver of light, the one who still echoes on.

How much we need that light from the porch calling us home. How much we need the lights of what is good and true telling us “This is where you lay your head.” 

As we step into our house, I looked back once more at the wall of woods that stands guard at the edge of our field. I wondered what would it be like to be a weary traveler stomping through the dark? What would hope look like? Would it look like someone saying that the darkness is where we live? That the mud and the cold and the raw edges of a dying creation are where we rest?

No, most certainly not.

For the weary traveler, the back porch with our lights shining over our coats and mittens, the kitchen countertop lamp, the table set with cookies and chips and the celebration of Christmas still dripping on the edges of all we do – this would be a more welcoming sight. 

So this year, this is all I aim to do in my writing. I do not wish to be enlightened or to have found a way with the words of the world so much that I begin to gain night vision and forget about home. I’m just a weary traveler. I’m longing for the warmth of where we all rest our heads. I’m eager for the celebration to last more than a week, but rather infinite millennia. I’m ready to turn my songs, stories, words, and home into a place where kindling is thrown onto the already burning flame of joy and hope in Christ. That somehow through what I write, as the road turns and the edges of a new year fade into the horizon, I would find my way back to where I rest.

I am no great thinker or philosopher. I am no intellectual who knows the twists and turns of every issue, every topic, every headline. But I do know that I carry the light. So I’ll do my best to light it brighter, bid you come and warm yourself by the fire, and tell you where I found it in the midst of this bleak midwinter.  

Last night I had a dream that you were missing.

For three days, we searched and I clawed at the side of an FBI agent who told me you were gone forever. I fell to my knees on the porch and screamed and I woke your Pa up with my cries.

“Babe?” He rubbed my arm as I whimpered my way back into the real world, out of the terror of night. Sleep evaded me then and I stared at the ceiling thinking of every mother who cannot find her child. Every mother who has lost a part of her heart and soul. I prayed for mothers who claw at the side of government agents who cannot find their children. I prayed for mothers whose children were taken during the night in Nigeria, for the mothers whose children never returned home from school, for the mothers at the border who were separated, never to see their son or daughter’s face again. Every mother who wakes from the terror of night to the gnawing ache of the day. 

--

We are on the cusp of the middle school years. This September, we launched our oldest into the waters teeming with social media, polarizing politics, confusing sexual ethics, peer pressure, a more demanding academic life, new friendships, all sorts of home lives converging in a public space where there is no normal, no baseline, no assumed morality. 

And she could not be more excited. 

The mothers who have gone before me give me mixed messages depending on their experience. I’m listening, of course. I want to hear how you handled those late-night conversations that erupted with emotion. How you responded when they decided you were too embarrassing to be seen with at school. (My answer: keeping singing loudly at drop off because she’ll survive that.) 

What you did with that one “friend’ who isn’t really a friend but your kid doesn’t seem to realize that yet. How you handled the questions that have no clear answer. How to prep your kid for all of those unseen things, temptations, moments that are racing toward you down the road and you just close your eyes, whisper desperate prayers, hoping against all hope that you’ve given them enough tools to respond with wisdom. 

—

I will screw this up. It’s inevitable. I’m human. I tell her this.

I’ll hold her tight and hug her until she’s squirming out of my arms. I rattle off the list of ways to live and how loved she is while we’re in the school drop-off line, fighting back my anxiety that what if this is the last time I talk to her?

The world feels so broken and unpredictable and no one can promise me that it isn’t.

I kiss her at bedtime and think of the 12-year-old kid who died in his sleep suddenly and no one knew why.

I love you I love you I love you

and my love cannot save you.

At the end of each day, I pull her into a long hug. I cup her face between my hands. “We love you, always, no matter what,” I say. She rolls her eyes.

“Mom, I know.”

“God loves you. He sees you. He knows more about you than you know about yourself.” She nods. We wrestle with doubts and fears, questions that won’t be wrapped up before a goodnight kiss. These years feel like a tightrope walk of faith, holding tightly to the promise that God knew her before I did. He crafted her edges, her weaker spots, her strengths, her need for Him.

I think of Mary the mother of Jesus as she watched him on the cross. How he suffered and died and she stood off to the side knowing full well her love could not save him.

But most assuredly, His love could save her.

“Parenting is the most frightening thing I’ve ever done,” I told my husband as we drifted off to sleep last night. Maybe that’s why my dreams were riddled with fear. Why I felt like I lost her despite all my attempts to do it right. Why I remembered that my love cannot save her, but His can.

—-

Today we listened to Weezer covers of 80’s hits. I pointed out the sunrise as we drove to school — lavender and lemon sky against the rusted and harvested earth. She squeaks out a low-key embarrassed “I love you too” in the parent drop-off line and I’ll take it because I don’t need her expressions to reciprocate mine. My Father taught me how to love this way.

I can’t give a downpayment on any of the promises but I know the Promise Holder. I can’t promise each sunrise but I know the one who holds the universe at its edges and shakes it new every day. I can’t prevent her pain or her tears, but I know the One who wraps his arms around her and catches every tear in a bottle, present and attentive to each one. My love cannot save her, but my love can teach her how to read a compass, how to lift her sails, how to find safe harbor and there on the open sea, my Love will meet her, catch her, hold her all the way home.

I was broken as I came into this world. For nearly 56 seconds, I didn’t breathe. Any parent will tell you those first silent seconds are excruciating as you wait. My parents waited. For nearly an eternal minute.

Then my legs. There was the issue of my legs. The shorter one. The hip that didn’t form correctly. I came in silent and malformed. Deformed. Broken.

For months and years, I was in and out of operating rooms. My legs were pinned and stabilized, scarred and wrapped in plaster. I dragged myself around in an army crawl, affectionately earning the nickname “walrus” from an older sibling while my broken body healed in a cast that kept me immovable from the waist down.

Broken when I arrived. 

Scars are interesting things. They have the potential to scream in nerve pain or go completely numb. I can remember being a child, running my finger along all of my scars, tracing the ones on my knees, my hips, my thighs, my stomach, and realizing I felt nothing. A part of me that wasn’t a part of me. Broken. A part of me that told a story but a story from which I felt somewhat detached. 

My heart would go on to drag more raw wounds across my own memory. Searing marks of error. Scars that screamed with pain for years until the One with the balm drew near. Scars that went numb because sometimes healing means losing something that was once alive.

A few years ago, the news of the kidney disease that is slowly destroying my kidneys and liver came suddenly. Like a snap in my normal day to day living, the words fell disjointed into my lap. It’s taken years for what is happening inside of me, invisible and undercover, to start to show up in the way I move, live, and breathe. Except now I feel the discomfort and unease of a body that is broken. Now I have regular appointments on the calendar that remind me. Medication taken in a steady rhythm of routine, reminding me that there isn’t a cure. Just buying time. “Get blood work done” marked on my calendar with a star so I don’t forget that this is important, life or death, broken. 

Broken when I arrived. I’ll be broken when I leave. 

And lately when I feel the acute reminders that my body has betrayed its own flesh and blood, I think of Jesus. I think of the night he dined with the men who would betray him. The bread broken, the wine poured, the knowledge that betrayal and brokenness was the way of mankind and that was why he was here anyway. 

I think of this as I feel another pang of pain, another message from my doctor, another prescription in the mail.

His body, the incarnate Son, the unbroken passover lamb, who willingly laid down his life, allowed his flesh to be split, his blood to be spilled, who knew the feeling of when your body gives out. The man who gave his body for his body. He who knows what the betrayal of your own flesh feels like. The man who knew that we were irrevocably broken from the moment we screamed our first breath until the moment we raggedly breathe our last. Broken when we arrive, Broken when we leave. 

And so he came to make a way for us to be made whole in Him. So that when we leave these bodies of death, we will be whole. For once. For the first time. Completely, wholly unbroken. His hands which have the scars of redemption. The scars of atonement. The scars of undoing brokenness. Scarred so that someday the scars that I trace my fingers along will be erased, revived, restored. 

The promise was never that we’d be completely whole here. It was never a guarantee that this aging and cursed world was the pinnacle of being whole. The promise was that through the brokenness, through the raw edges of incurable bodies, scarred knees, wounded hearts, we’d see that he was making all things new.

Broken when I arrived. Broken when I leave.

And then, at last, whole.

“Look underneath the leaves,” I tell my daughter this as we’re elbow deep in berry brambles. Thorns tear at our hands and forearms as we straddle the vines and a skunk hole just beneath our feet. We wouldn’t normally be here on this corner of the woods, but today I have a white bowl tucked under my arm and we’re hunting for black raspberries. This little cove of thorns and vines boasted a crown of berries catching the afternoon sun so here we are.

“I think I’ve got them all,” she says. Her fingertips are purple and a handful of berries piles into my bowl.

“Did you look underneath?” I ask again. “That’s where the best ones are hiding. Just underneath the surface.”

She lifts a leaf with her fingertips, trying to avoid the branches that are sure to draw blood. “Whoa,” she remarks. “Ok, yeah, there’s more.” There under the sharp edges and the now barren surface is a world of fruit. Shaded, healthier, less likely to be picked off by birds. A robust harvest of black raspberries spills into the bowl, piling it up to the surface. 

“I think we need another bowl,” she laughs.

---

I never intend for all of my interactions with the teeming nature just outside our back door to be moments of lessons. I can’t help but see Romans 1 in action everywhere I turn. While all of our culture seems to be living out Romans 1:21-23, I’m going to keep returning to Romans 1:19-20 —

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

There is no error in creation. No analogy that isn’t there with intention. No picture of God that is there by coincidence or “Isn’t that interesting?” moments. It’s all intentional. And for those of us who see it, it becomes clear. God’s creation shouts of his character, his attributes, who he is. 

I see again it today as we fill a ceramic bowl with fresh wild raspberries and my daughter asks to learn how to find a berry patch. 

--

I’m thinking of every moment I’ve felt invisible. Every moment I’ve felt hidden while the ones who manage to make their way to the surface get picked and I feel stuck under a mammoth leaf. I think of every faithful pastor, mother, friend, worker, bible study leader, group leader, elderly woman, single dad, reserved child. I think of every time I’ve tried to get attention for the good in my life and it seems God is more interested at doing work at something below the surface where no one else can see.

I think about the fruit that grows healthy, sweeter, and vibrant just underneath the surface. The stuff that no one else can see. The stuff that seems non-existent until someone lifts the edge of a leaf and a world of fruitfulness is revealed. 

Fruitfulness in the homes that aren’t making it to influencer-level status on instagram. Fruitfulness in the marriages that are faithfully working it out every day. Fruitfulness in the mother who needs the grace of God to sustain her on another long summer day. Fruitfulness in the bible study leader who won’t ever make it to a main stage but who knows what it looks like to disciple someone. 

This is all I’m thinking of as our bowl fills.

Fruitfulness in the single parent who pours into their children at bedtime, with no one else to take note. Fruitfulness in the person who seems ordinary, not shiny, not that impressive. Maybe just someone you’d normally pass by assuming they don’t have much to offer.

Fruitfulness in all of the shaded corners, surrounded by skunk holes, fallen branches. There things root deep into the earth and find their growth.

Just underneath. Just hidden. Fully healthy. Content to grow without the fanfare of being seen. Content to grow to full health, protected, covered.

And it may seem obvious. It may seem like another analogy packed into nature, ready for anyone who wants to see it.

(Which it is. That’s the point.)

But today, if you feel hidden, invisible, unseen, trust that the One who makes you fruitful has not forgotten the place where He’s planted you to grow. Those massive leaves aren’t shadows. They’re protection. Grow healthy there. Be fruitful. Just underneath. 

“Why do you do that?” a friend asked me.

The lace tablecloths and patterned sheets fluttered like flags on the evening breeze. Yes, I have a dryer. Yes, I know that I can just put them in the dryer.

But have you ever seen the way a rose-stitched tablecloth moves under the golden sun? Have you ever laid down at the end of a summer day under a quilt that smells like the edges of spring and the sweetness of rain? They can’t capture this stuff in a Tide bottle. 

“I do it because of the way it smells,” I laugh. We all chuckle. Why haul a heavy basket of wet laundry out behind the barn, at the edge of the daisy-filled field to hang sopping wet blankets, cloths, and bedding just for the smell?

Tonight, I did it again. A basket sidled up against my hip, maple clothespins pinched to the edge of my tank top, a summer breeze, an empty clothesline. I tried to reason with myself as I walked. 

“I could just put this in the dryer,” I muttered. “But I’m also saving on electricity and that seems to matter these days, right? But that’s not why I’m really doing it.”

I hang up the first blanket. It’s our winter comforter. The one filled with goose down. I’ve just stripped our beds from all of the cold weather bedding and I’ll wash it all before it goes into a plastic tub until November. It’s heavy but the wind picks it up without a struggle. The kids will run through it later, their tiny faces peeking around it like a stage curtain. In November, when I pull it from the gray bin, I’ll remember summer, the hot sun, and our burned noses.

Our matching sheets are next. Like a sail, the fitted sheet billows out. The hay in the field moves with it. A quiet symphony for anyone who cares to hear, anyone who stops to witness and pay attention. 

These wandering thoughts continue until I’m snapped back to reality when I’ve run out of clothespins. The beauty and the earth, the ordinary work of laundry, and the common grace of wildflowers and summer winds — this is why I do that. I don’t need a moral or economic reason for everything. I don’t need a cause or a purpose for the simple act of enjoying the very accessible gifts God has stretched between those two ancient walnut trees behind my barn. 

I do it because it makes me love it all more. The earth, the summer, the laundry, the people, the fields, the wind, the sun, the work. All of it. I wonder how much we all avoid doing things we simply find beautiful and good because we’re so laden down with the need to explain ourselves. 

Why are you eating that ice cream? A million reasons we could answer, but in reality it’s because it’s sweet and a delight to our tongues. It reminds me of childhood and little league games by the creek. Why are you laughing? A hundred points of why, but really because we still can. Because in this messy world, when grief and wickedness abounds, we still find ways to laugh and let our souls lift for a moment.

Why are you planting those seeds? Why are you wearing that nice dress? Why are you singing? Why are you painting that? Reading that? Enjoying that?

Because before we were consumers, we were consummate enjoyers. I cannot get to Eden from this side of Heaven but I can remind my heart that when the wind blows, I can step a bit closer to that thin veil where the sound of music from some faraway land makes ripples on my skin for just a brief moment. 

Simply because I want to. 

“I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.” Ecclesiastes 3:12-13

When Costi asked me to review his book, it was a no brainer. Having walked the stage with some powerhouse health and wealth teachers early on in my adulthood, I wanted to hear the story of someone who knew the system inside and out and could speak into it with some Gospel clarity. The prosperity gospel sounds so good. It’s subtle. It shades the edges of so many of our local churches, the songs we listen to, and even the prayers we pray. But I was only a few pages into Costi Hinn’s book when I had to set it down. One deep breath of a sobering realization settled in my chest.

“I know I lived through some of this,” I said to my husband. “But I didn’t realize that this was the gimmick. It’s a whole thing. They all do the same thing. The deception is the same.”

I was only 17 when the traveling ministry from Miami rolled through my town. Rural upstate New York is the opposite of Miami Beach, in every way possible. We were rough around the edges country folk. Blue jeans that didn’t fit quite right. Mid-‘90s Doc Martens covered with late October mud. They, however, were polished. Tailored suits and unscathed high heels. Perfect hair and flawless makeup. Expensive cologne and white smiles.

For weeks he preached and prayed, money flying out of our pockets while we fell to the ground. We, the faithful, showed up to the small church on the hill night after night for weeks on end. The committed ones. The ones who wanted revival. And for weeks on end, he told us how revival was coming. How we needed to believe more. Give more. Sacrifice more. How our acts of faith were the same as the widow’s mite. We needed to give sacrificially. Be willing to take a risk. Maybe then God would show up.

Please, we begged, baggy jeans and country knees to the floor. Show up.

This was the rhythm I would eventually learn. Not long after they arrived in our little church, the man in the suit turned to me and said, “Come with us.” And so I did. Halfway through my senior year of high school and until I was nearly 20, I played piano and sang night after night while we traveled from city to city. The story was the same every night — two sermons. One on money. One on God’s coming revival. That was the one that usually tied to your circumstances. The one that asked if you had bills to pay, rent due, illness in your body, an unsaved family member, that God’s revival would come if you had enough faith. If you believed enough, shouted enough, prayed enough, gave enough.

“Give and it will give back to you,” he’d say. Direct correlations drawn between how sacrificial your giving was and how active God would be. As if His desire to move was contingent on us. On my money. On my faith. On my action and ability, willingness and desperation. On how loudly we’d could shout or how much we had cried. God was a reluctant guest who needed a bit more convincing to actually show up at the party.

We traveled from Miami to New Jersey to Michigan to Alaska. The same message everywhere we went. God was bringing blessing and revival. God also was telling you to fund that mission. Sow a seed to see what God will do. Speak as though you have it. Don’t say you’re sick — say “The doctor may say I’m sick, but I believe I’m healed.”

It didn’t take long for the strings to unravel.

For part of one stretch in Michigan, while the pastor and his wife rolled around town in a Jaguar, the ministry interns were getting our food and essentials off of the local food donation truck. They dined wherever their ministry supporters were taking them. We dined on the dented cans and expired boxes of Chef Boyardee and mac and cheese.

Yet night after night, I sang the songs. Night after night, I counted the offerings. Night after night, we participated in the same cut-and-paste routine. Marriages were struggling. Illness was represented en masse. Homeless guests would come listen. What a spectacle to see. Our door-to-door “evangelism” ministry was led by a slick salesman from Ohio. He taught us how to nod when we asked people questions.

“Before you know it,” he said, “they’re nodding with you. That counts as a salvation. Write it down.”

Stacks of names would be brought in night after night. People who sat next to us on the buses, met us in the streets, nodded with us when we asked if they were afraid to go to hell. Names of people I never saw again. Faces I never knew beyond a number. That stack of names was held up in front of the cash poor crowd each night.

“See?” the man would say. “Revival! Be desperate for a move of God and ask him to show up.” An offering (or two) later, an altar call, and the night repeated itself like a prosperity gospel-fueled Groundhog Day. One day we’d be in front of a laughing, hysterical crowd in Oklahoma City with checks being cut to us numbering in the thousands backstage. Other days, when the veneer wore off, I could barely move out of bed from the depression and hopelessness that weighed so heavy on my soul.

And yet the good news of Jesus was nowhere in sight. No water to drink. We offered handfuls of dust. We took money from people who needed it. We spent money in Manhattan on leather shoes and tailored suits. Money that was to us given by people who needed to pay for medical bills, credit card debt, Christmas.

The prosperity gospel was planted. We reaped no good.

It can be tempting to call it harmless. That it’s just some skewed scripture, people who mean well, people who just want good for you. It seems like nothing more than a slight optimistic bend on faith, money, and sickness…until you pull back the curtain and see that this is no subtle, nuanced song. This is deafening, deadly theology.

In “God, Greed, and the Prosperity Gospel”, Costi Hinn bravely puts the prosperity gospel on notice. As one who lived among it, he is now a man marked with the story of the true Gospel. We listen to those who have the scars. The ones who’ve braved the fires and the wars and live to tell about it. The ones who can point to their limp and say “God won.”

Costi saw the brokenness, the hierarchies, the lies that twist and distort scripture so much that it takes years of undoing. Costi, the nephew of well-known “health and wealth” preacher Benny Hinn, tells his story of what it was like growing up inside the private jet and speak-as-though-you-have-it walls. He wore the clothes and drove the cars but within his chest there was a steady call that compelled him to seek, find, and know Christ.

And while I’m thankful for the exposure of lies that this book addresses, what I’m even more thankful for is Costi’s immense humility and compassion exhibited in his writing. This isn’t a tell-all exposé. This isn’t meant to destroy a person or give some juicy details that will grease the gossip mills. “God, Greed, and the (Prosperity) Gospel” isn’t meant to simply garner applause for Costi and his bravery.

This book points to a man, a gospel, a kingdom that is far more beautiful, desirable, and worthy than that of the prosperity gospel. Costi points to Christ as a clear bell ringing in the fog of his struggle with what he had grown up with. Where the theology of men fails and the twisting of scripture only contorts our feet, Costi tells how the Lord patiently worked to rescue him and set him on solid ground. He gives scripture, practical wisdom, and narrative throughout to teach and encourage anyone picks up this book. He calls to something better, something truer, something richer. The good news of the Gospel is the best news for those caught in the web of the prosperity theology — God is more faithful than you could possibly imagine, speak, or dream.

“God, Greed, and the (Prosperity) Gospel” releases on July 9 and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s available for pre-order now!

Amazon

It’s 5:25 a.m. The birdsong and frogs in the pond woke me up while the earth was still gray and foggy. Early morning commuters are splashing through the fresh puddles on the road and I’m here, in my yellow chair, Psalm 7 open in front of me. The lilac bush outside our bedroom window is nearly ready to burst with fresh flowers. And the rest of the house sleeps.

Yet, my mind is the opposite of the world outside. Fears, worry, lists, busy noise. It won’t let me sleep. As heavy as my eyelids are and desperate to crawl back into bed next to my sleeping husband and sprawled out toddler (who happened to find his way into our bed again during the night), my mind cannot rest.

I’m on the other side of 35 now. I’m a few years away from 40, having just passed the tree-line of 36. The hill rises above me and though I have not gone over it yet, I feel my body preparing.

“We’re getting older,” a friend said recently. She’s a few years ahead of me and we were rattling off the most recent health concerns in our own failing bodies. These bodies that aren’t meant to be preserved and pristine. These internal clocks that tick toward the end. My latest slew of doctors visits and lab work have to do with the infamous hormones that rise and fall within us women. The ones that make us feel like we’re losing our minds. The ones that help us feel deeply. The ones that make us vibrant and joyful, and exhausted and weary, all in the same 24-hour stretch. The ones that aren’t so simple and predictable.

Everything is fine, I whisper to myself at the edge of the morning. Everything you feel is not true. Everything you fear is not certain. The rise of the wave of fear mounts within me about nothing in particular. It settles on a prey and then devours that thing. My kids. My future. Finances. The garden. The church. Culture. Friends in distress. My own body. Like a roaring lion, it seeks something to devour. My hormones cue stress and I sit in the silence trying to tell them, “Everything is fine. You’re ok.”

My own mother tells me this morning, “Relax today. Destress.” I laugh a little. She knows. “De-stressing” sometimes feels like the most stressful endeavor.

I wish I could tell my hormones to trust in Jesus, I tell my mother. I wish what I knew in my head started to trickle down into my body. I feel a bit like David in Psalm 103, facing my own skin and bones, blood and organs, body and mind to say —

Praise the Lord, my soul;

   all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

Praise the Lord, my soul,

   and forget not all his benefits—

who forgives all your sins

   and heals all your diseases,

who redeems your life from the pit

   and crowns you with love and compassion,

who satisfies your desires with good things

   so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

This is not some prosperity, health and wealth gospel. This is me telling my body to trust in the Lord and remember him. This is me picking up the quivering chin of my inward being to say “Look at him. You can trust him.”

Dear hormones, trust the Lord. Everything is ok. He’s holding it all. Dear organs, worship him. Dear mind and heart and blood and muscle, praise the Lord. This is not an exhortation; this is a command.

The rain stopped this morning but the birds continued to sing. I read scripture again and prayed. I traced over Spurgeon’s words about the Lord who heals and wasn’t disgusted by humanity’s broken bodies. I crawled into bed next to my two sleeping men and I went back to sleep.

The days are long and gray. A bland color palette greets us each morning. That is springtime in New York. A heavy fog that settles over our fields, our homes, and further enhances the ashy hue of our hearts. When it’s April and snow is still in the forecast, you understand why people move south. Why their skin begs for sun. It’s easy to forget in the long winter that it won’t last forever. My daffodils have bloomed but they’re small. Much smaller than they should be. They persisted through the autumn leaves that piled and came out to say a weak, but definitive “Good morning.”

My twitter-friend John Blase recently posted “When I was a boy, I was told to steer clear of booze, and sex, and drugs, and rock'n'roll, and...I still keep my distance from some of that, but now that I am a man, I know the great enemy is despair.”

Despair — the heavy darkness that seems to lure its prey with the idea of solidarity but only to suffocate it with its weight. We are at first tempted to think that despair is a friend to the battered, tired heart. A ringing bell of reality to which we must pay allegiance. Springtime in New York reminds me that despair is more like the mud that I slog through in my boots. Dark and cement-like. Deep and deceptive. Just on the edges of everywhere we step.

It isolates, chilling us inside invisible walls. Everyone else is happy. Everyone else is fine. Everyone else is living their dream. Out of nowhere, it grips us on the back of our necks, a feline-like grip of control, rendering us helpless, limp, rag dolls until we’re dropped where it leaves us.

It seems to come when we least expect it to. The uninvited guest in the middle of the day when I haven’t yet put on makeup. The middle of the night phone call that requires clarity of mind before you’ve left dreamland. The doctor’s report that is just obscure and vague enough and makes you wonder if the horizon of your life is closer than you thought it was. 

Despair is what brings many women through the doors of my home, our church offices, my inbox, my phone messages. Despair is the burden on their shoulders they point to when we sit eye to eye. How do we keep our eyes on heaven when the world feels too heavy? 

There is no easy, fast answer. Despair feeds us a meager serving of slop. The pilgrimage to home may feel long and weary, and we could easily think that slop is our portion. But it’s not. The Gospel was never meant to be a diversion. It’s not a placebo. 

Don’t get me wrong — it is indeed the source of all joy. The bottomless well of peace. The fountain of unmovable strength. But it is not a cream we apply. It is the bed we lay down in.

We are living in a dark world. Full of the dust of feet, the stain of sin, the continuous ramifications of a world leading one another around in the pitch black night. We swing lanterns for each other along the path. We say “Let’s talk about the way home.”

We keep going back to this: read the letters from Zion. The scripture is full of reminders of people who had burdens too heavy to bear, fears that seemed insurmountable, and yet, they made it home, faithfully plodding along, one step at a time. Somehow (by grace we know) their steps lifted. The pilgrim hearts knew that despair wasn’t a verdict. Those with hearts set on home, as the writer sang in Psalm 84, had Zion written in their hearts.

“Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion”

They knew the road, like a well-worn path in front of them. The Psalm sings “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” We can repeat those words in the shadowed doorframe of our heart. No good thing has he withheld. Even despair, which longs to tell us that our happiness can be traded on the black market for whatever it is our soul thinks it needs, even despair can take a backseat to this reminder. He reminds us he has not withheld. And we can tell our weary hearts that in the day we need him to sustain and provide, he will not keep one hand behind his back. God is not in a cat and mouse game with us. 

Scripture reminds me that he catches my tears in a bottle. 
He knows our frame; he remembers we are dust. 
He is near to the brokenhearted. He binds up their wounds. 
A bruised reed he will not crush. 
He doesn’t snuff out the smoldering wick. 
He sees the outsiders. 
He loves those on the fringe. 
He didn’t come for the healthy. 
The poor in spirit are blessed. 
That He’ll sustain us to the end.

Despair may linger but grace lingers longer. 

Dear pilgrim, throw aside the burden that strangles, the fear that entangles. I have slogged through enough spring mud to tell you this — it doesn’t keep the plants from growing. It doesn’t stop the summer from coming. Maybe you come through it with not as much bravado as we hoped. Maybe you’re more aware of your stature, like my daffodils, smaller and a little more aware of fragility. We may lose some life along the way, some early spring vigor, but that which can persist, does. And the Spirit of God will not be smothered underneath an ashy, disheartened fog. The French philosopher Albert Camus said “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” This is the fight against despair. To believe that God sees and knows and sustains within you a heart that is set on Zion. He brings life where you see only dirt. He turns valleys of tears into doors of hope. He is the invincible summer.

I talk with a lot of women. All the time. As the director of women’s ministry at my church, this is my day in and day out. Through texting, emergency tear-filled phone calls, the humming soundtrack of coffeeshop conversations, the quiet of counseling rooms. I hear their stories in my DMs, on Sunday mornings while my children run amok, at our community group when the women gather around the sink, the snacks, the couch. I’ve prayed for them over paninis, challenged them over omelets, listened to their hurt over oat milk lattes, shared my story while sitting on a sun-cooked park bench. They’ve been 18 and hurting, 25 and hopeful, 32 and broken, 47 and tired, 60 and encouraged, 80 and laughing. Married, single, divorced, abused, tired, successful, driven, widowed, broken, sinful, bold.

And if there’s anything I’ve seen in the myriad of different faces I’ve sat across from, it’s this — there is a thread of gold within each moment. In each tear, in each prayer, in each question that claws at the earth, in each breath, it’s this — the world cannot deeply and wholly satisfy. The hope of the Gospel is the answer.

Really and truly.

And yes, there are some immediate treatments. There are bandages and salves, words of comfort or rebuke, stories and snippets of wisdom to apply immediately. But at the core, when we’ve exhausted our worldly depths of wisdom, there is only one thing that remains.

Christ is enough. He sees you and says, because of Him, you’re held, sustained, kept. From beginning to end, from author to finisher, from first breath to final gasp, He sees, loves, intercedes, and is near.

In every bend and curve of our life and femininity, there is design, there is hope, there is a chance to be made new.

I’ve heard time and time again of the heavy burden of the world. I’ve seen how it has contorted thinking. I’ve seen how in my own life, my own habits, my own shortcomings, how I’ve feasted at a table that cannot ever fill. How I’ve binged on Eve’s fruit. I’ve believed the world could answer my appetite, be the standard-bearer for beauty, and make me wise. 

It was an empty well. A deadly tree. A counterfeit truth.

My friend Lore and I have a text thread. One that looks a lot like updating each other on life, asking how the other is doing (“Friend, how is your heart? How are you really doing?”), and then things like this — “Why is the message for women so loud and so wrong?”

One day we asked why and then spent hours texting about the doomed mess that is the messages of “You’re an amazing mermaid!” And “Trust yourself always.” And “Go get what you deserve.” And “You don’t need to change. Everyone else needs to accept you the way you are.” While we elevate ourselves, we also have become masters at destroying every good gift He’s given us. From our hips to our thoughts, our homes to our wardrobe, women hear that we’re not pretty enough, slim enough, sexy enough, smart enough, brave enough, rich enough, funny enough, and on and on. Everywhere we turn, the message is saturating my feeds, my meetings, and even my thoughts. What seemed harmless and silly a few years ago now has a following, a conversion rate, an influence, a platform.

And because of all the faces who look me in the eye week after week, because of the young woman I’m raising in my own home, the cost is too high to turn a blind eye. I can’t pretend that it’s not trickling down into thought, practice, families, homes.

So Lore and I decided we’d take our conversations public and start a podcast. Good Enough is going to exist for this reason — in a culture that tells us who we are and what we do is never enough, God breathes into these bodies of dust and says “It is good.” When we are weary of all that we cannot carry, when the burden is too heavy, Christ says “Let me keep you. Let me sustain you. Let me remind you of who you are in me.” 

We’re going to look at 14 different ways the world tells us we need to strive more, believe more, taste the fruit, feast at the empty table. And then we’re going to find the better way. We’re not going to get it all right. We’re going to make some blunders, no doubt. But I told her at the end of the podcast, when we ask “Was that good?” We can say, “Eh….it was good enough.”

Good Enough launches in May 2019. Stay tuned.

It was a dark and stormy night. Quite literally. Texas thunder, apocalyptic lightning, and a frightened 23-year-old girl pacing the carpeted hallways of her apartment.

I traced my finger along the words of scripture. As if I could read it again and find a different edge, a different meaning, a different way to interpret it so that I could fall asleep. On my laptop, I had pulled up multiple websites that told me what I was doing was ok. They had even given me scriptures. They told me how I was actually doing what was good, necessary, life-giving. I found comfort, ears brushed with a gentle breeze that told me I wasn’t walking into the blistered arms of sin. They told me the words I read were misinterpreted. They asked “Who really knows if the Bible is true at all?” They told me repentance wasn’t necessary. Suddenly the teachings of the church and of the Bible seemed archaic, outdated, and I was misunderstood.

But the scripture burned my heart. The Bible felt heavy in my hands, gravity pulling at its edges and my knees.

The words of Christ were the edge of a sword that was ready to cut me down.

From the outside looking in, things were going fairly well. To anyone who met me, I was living a decent life. I was a recent transplant to Denton, TX from New York. I worked long hours for the regional newspaper office as a page designer, writer, and occasional photographer for whatever event they wanted me to cover. I attended church and was making new friends. I was even in the process of becoming a member and had joined a small group. I went out with friends on Friday nights and introduced them all to my boyfriend as if everything was right, good, and not blowing up in my face.

Which it was, by the way. It was a massive dumpster fire.

Because my boyfriend was also someone’s husband back in New York. I had left New York when news of our affair became public and I needed a place to disappear. I wanted a new life, to start over, a new identity. For awhile, I considered even going by a different name. I tried, asking new friends to call me by my middle name. I could rewrite my identity, give myself a new name, create my own future.

I figured if I could change my home and my name and the faces that knew me, then maybe I could change the outcome of my life. Maybe I could change the verdict. If I didn’t want God or the church telling me what to do, then surely I could rewrite my own story.

I didn’t want to be told I couldn’t be with him.
I wanted someone to tell me it was ok.
I wanted the Bible to fit my story. I didn’t want any impositions.

So I’d spend hours at night, searching websites for a truth that fit what I felt. And I found it. Other people with the same story. People who knew what I felt and thought, “How could God possibly be against this?” I built entire friend circles of people who didn’t tell me I was wrong, who celebrated my freedom, who wagged their finger at those “judgmental Christians.”

I marveled at stories of American heroes like Johnny Cash and June Carter. If they could make it work and everyone loved them still, so could we.

And one night I faced the choice. The lightning lit up the parking lot and I could see the outline of the trees, the buildings, the alleyway where I parked my bike. It felt like darkness was hiding me in that small one bedroom and I rounded my shoulders under its weight. As I looked at the idea of Christ, and looked at what he had to offer, and then considered the man with whom I shared my heart, my home, my bed, I realized I didn’t want what Christ had to offer.

“If it’s you or him, if it’s heaven or hell, I’ll take this earthly joy and pay the price.” I slammed my Bible shut. I asked to make my bed and lie in it.

Even typing the words now sends a cold slice of fear down my spine as it did the day I whispered them.

Psalm 139 says “Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.

Years later, I think of that girl. The one who thought she could run from the “Hound of Heaven.” I think of her, knees shaking, stomach knotted into nausea while she thought she could tell God to go ahead and let her go.

I thank Him that he didn’t take my direction. I thank God that He kept me when I asked Him not to. I marvel and wonder that He thought it best to hear my words and not willingly grant me my ask. That somehow within a few years time, when I had followed the path that gave me the most earthly freedom and joy and I realized it was all dust in my mouth and moths in my heart, He was still there. In fact, when I made my bed in hell, He was there. When I said “Let darkness cover me and the light about me be night,” He never once took his hand or eyes off of me. On my darkest night, when I whispered those words and prayed that the sword of the son of God would stop gutting me, He was immovable, compassionately detached from my pleas, sovereignly unmoved by my rebellion, eternally faithful to His own promise in my heart.

I couldn’t change my name, as it turned out. My identity wasn’t mine to write. By his mercy, he preserved me. He upheld me despite my kicking and screaming.

So dear friend,

when you’re wringing the words of Christ and looking for away to get out of your contract,
when the Bible feels heavy and the sword cuts deep,
when the words of the internet bring more comfort than the Spirit,
when you realize you’d rather make your bed in hell than trust him with your despair,
let me save you some time.

There is no greater joy, no greater pleasure, no sweeter love, no deeper knowledge, no truer identity, no steadier grace than the one that comes from the hand that preserves, that slays, that keeps. And my prayer is that you’ll see as I did—

One day he would let me die so that I could live.
That one day I’d see the bed I’d made was in His hands.

I grew up with my mom’s Bible open at the breakfast table. She wasn’t always there. Work called early for an RN who walked the floors of a hospital. I’d be slopping milk in a bowl of cereal and see where she sat just hours before.

Her open Bible, her notes in cursive fresh in the margins, a mug with one sip of tea left at the bottom, a cooled tea bag resting on a spoon. This was a familiar sight.

If mom ever writes you a note, you know it’s going to include scripture. It’s going to include a verse that she’s praying over you, or something she read that reminded her to write. Years ago, when I was dining with the wayward and drinking my fill of what the world had to offer, my mother would write me notes and slip them into my room, the mail, in e-mails. Floral notecards with her familiar handwriting, a hint of her perfume in each opened envelope. Without fail, she’d speak scripture and it would slice me open, expose me, and make me wonder why I ever walked away at all. Even when she knew I didn’t want to hear it, she sent it. She never defaulted to the wisdom of the world. She knew what had sustained her and offered me the same bread. It was a familiar call from mountain to valley. Echoes of what I had once known.

Mom’s open Bible was so normal and seemed so easy. It was an extension of the rest of her. 

But today, I’m at my dining room table and my 10 year old is trying to explain to me the mnemonic device she learned to convert Kg into mg and gallons into cups. Meanwhile, my toddler is crying that the toast he asked for isn’t the toast he asked for, and that his pencil isn’t blue with a pink eraser as he apparently is convinced is necessary in this moment.

I have re-read the same 10 verses in 1 Corinthians 1 about 5 times now, each time with more frustration, more annoyance, more feeling like a failure to each of these things: my eager 5th grader, my attention-desperate 2 year old, my hungry and tired heart.

And then I remembered my mother’s Bible. No doubt (because I remember) she cracked it open when we all flooded her with questions and conversations. It sat open when I cried about boys. It sat open when my brother and I bombarded her with complaints on her day off. It sat open when the vacuum ran, the dishes clanked, the voices raised. My mother understood something that I’m just now learning.

Sitting at scripture isn’t something to check off my list. It’s not always a solitary feast. It’s where I dip my toes for a moment to remind me of the water that fuels my spirit. Somedays I have time to study. Somedays I have time to open a commentary, to dig deeper into the text, to know it and realize I don’t know it in 100 different ways.

But today I read “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” And I ask my 10yo while she checks her homework and fills her backpack, “What do you think that means?”

She stops. “What does folly mean?” she asks.

Oh, she’s actually listening. 

And we talk. About how the world may laugh. How friends won’t understand. How even we sometimes don’t get it. And yet, it’s the water, it’s the meal, it’s the sustenance, the Gospel that keeps us. She asks more, the Bible stays open, the toddler cries a bit more because now the milk he has is not the milk he asked for, and I am moving around like a blur. A robed, slipper-wearing worker bee who is meeting the needs of body and soul this morning. My coffee is nearly done and yet it sits, cooling, by the open book, my notes scribbled on a small notepad nearby. 

In one moment I look down and I see it. No, I see her. I see my mother and the faithful, well-worn path she laid before me. Our breakfast table wasn’t about the cereal and the tea and the toast and the coffee. It was a feast she laid before us, remnants of what she had found, morsels that whisper “Walk this way.”

So, mothers of young children, lets walk the well-worn path. Let’s open our Bibles while breakfast is served, while the bus watch is moments away, while the coffee is poured and the bananas aren’t banana-y enough, while questions about the metric system and “Can we have a sleepover” are bouncing around the table. Open the Bible, trust that even in imperfect, quick moments, the Bible is far more capable of doing the work it was created to do. To cut, to plant, to grow, to sustain. All right here. 

“Help us to embrace obscurity,” my pastor once prayed. I scribbled it down in the margin of my notebook. I wrote it down on another piece of paper and put it somewhere to remind me day in and day out.

Yes Lord, help us to embrace obscurity.

Help us to embrace the ordinary ins and outs of a faithful life.

Help us to embrace the steady rhythm of living. The air in, the air out, the one-thing-at-a-time mindset in a world that tells you everything matters all the time right now.

Help us to chew our food and taste it. Help us to choose ingredients that taste like real food and recipes that feed our bodies.

Help us to embrace an empty calendar. Help us to do this by choice.

Help us to shun the cultural mindset that the movers and shakers are sleeping less, traveling everywhere, and starting something new every day. Help us to be moved into a place of trust. To not require shaking in order to anchor ourselves in you. To get enough sleep, plant some roots, and trust the ancient paths.

Help us to embrace quiet. The kind that makes even the sock-covered feet move delicately. The kind that makes the old house creak just to remind us that it’s still here.

Help us to live like our Lord, who went to solitary places, who sought out times to be alone, because the noise and the crowds and the demands wasn’t the goal.

Help us to feel the hot water and the dish soap, to be a part of the simple work that is necessary. To let a finger fall gently on a piano key and feel the way the note reverberates into your arms as though it’s just an old woman doing her duty, humming the song she’s always known.

Help us to pray in the in-between. To take our fears and remember that for all the things I fear will happen, today someone might be actually facing that thing. Remind me to carry them with the same burden of weight that I feel when I dread that it could be me. It is them. Remind me to bring that to you.

Help us to be pilgrims. To open up our hands a bit more. To leave what can be left behind, behind. To talk about home more. And no, not the home where we sleep every night. I mean to talk about the home that we’re journeying toward. The place where we’ll finally lay down our burdens. The place from which our Father runs to meet us. The long dusty road toward the party. Help us to remind each other “We’re not home yet” and to reminisce a bit about the place we know exists but have never seen.

I’m coming up on my 36th year. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this — the world doesn’t need you. It will go on without you. The reminder of age will creak inside you when you least expect it and you’ll suddenly be aware that you don’t want the world anyway. Not the one that is peddled and curated and marketed and on the clearance rack. You want the storied blankets. The golden sun. The early mornings with the people you love. You want the ease of people who know when you’re not fine even when you say “I’m fine.” You want the creaky floors of a life well-lived, day in and day out, faithfully, steadily, mostly in obscurity. Help me to embrace it, Lord.