Blessing in Desert Places

    It was August when my husband and I moved last year to the desert Southwest. We arrived in plenty of time to soak up the last month of 100-degree weather. Since then, we have experienced sandstorms that recall in living color the old movies where cowboys wore...
Read More →

Saved But Not Yet Safe

  I recently read Carmen Joy Imes’s Bearing God’s Name, an accessible, albeit somewhat academic meditation on the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai. This is just my sort of thing, both meditative and intellectual, biblical and gentle. During the course of the book, Imes...
Read More →

God Adopts Little Girls Too

      In the ancient world, baby girls were in effect disposable. Women were necessary to produce the next generation, but they could not inherit, fight in wars, or carry the family name, so girls were not generally seen as worthy of much investment. In parts of ancient...
Read More →

Into the Silence

    There is something about the deep darkness of a cave that brings a hush over everyone who enters. Last week, in our ongoing effort to explore our new home in the Southwest, we visited Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Seeing the Caverns had been on my husband’s wish...
Read More →

Shattered at the Foot of the Holy Mountain

  [The following is based on a sermon preached at Trinity Anglican Seminary, 5 June 2024.]    Lectionary : Deut 5:6-21 Ps 81:1-10(11-16) 2 Cor 4:1-12 Mark 2:23-28    There is a FoxTrot comic from 1988 in which Peter, the athletic older brother, asks his nerdy younger brother...
Read More →

Sing Her to Sleep

    The gentle summer day my friend made her journey from home to hospice was marked by a little parade of loved ones. As the medics carried her to the ambulance, her sisters, husband, and daughter filed out into the sunshine behind her, and for reasons I cannot...
Read More →

Why Suffering?

    A couple of years ago, a colleague shared with a few of us that her daughter was suffering from a likely terminal cancer. The child rallied and faltered, and we rode the waves with her family in our prayers. We cooed over photographs of her bald little nine-year-old...
Read More →

Sing Her to Sleep

    The gentle summer day my friend made her journey from home to hospice was marked by a little parade of loved ones. As the medics carried her to the ambulance, her sisters, husband, and daughter filed out into the sunshine behind her, and for reasons I cannot...
Read More →

For the Love of a Worm

    It has been almost thirty years since I met Derek, but I can still hear his mother’s words echoing in my mind. “This is Derek,” she said as her cherubic looking toddler looked up at me, “He’ll be trouble.” I wondered, in that moment, how a mother could choose to...
Read More →

Momentary Friends

    I had spent the night in an airport on a ten-hour layover, not quite as awful as it sounds but no rival for the much-anticipated comfort of my own home. Bleary-eyed as we took off at 7 AM—no one on the flight was what my father would have called “bright-eyed and...
Read More →