Author: Fragments of Light

Risk

After two weeks of frigid winds and temperatures plummeting below zero-degrees Fahrenheit, at last the sun again extended its regal hand of mercy to Colorado. Eagerly I wheeled my bike out of hibernation into crisp, clear, tolerably cold air. Halfway through the ride, my spirit soared in wonder. I stumbled on the route not long before…Read more Risk

Holy Ground

Bushes still burn today without being consumed. I feel the flames in dark corners of the world where people suffer - the Spirit of God brooding, fierce with unquenchable yearning to gather His little ones into His arms. I can only fall to my knees in humble adoration, let the fire overtake my being. And…Read more Holy Ground

A Tameable Beast in Haiti

I am the two-faced lover of the developing world, the smiling maiden offering a delicacy secretly laced with poison. With one breath, I nurture and I kill. I demand whole-hearted devotion. They come to me in droves as I freely flow, offering daily obeisance in the washing of clothes and communal bathing. From first waking…Read more A Tameable Beast in Haiti

A Beautiful River in Uganda

As most passengers triumphantly hoisted luggage off the belt, my mom and I watched and waited. Finally with a few lonely bags circling round and round in the increasingly vacated baggage claim, we acknowledged the obvious and filtered over to the airline desk to file our claim. Undaunted, we woke the next morning to the…Read more A Beautiful River in Uganda

The Woman at the Well in Haiti

I fall in step behind an old woman who pads along the rocky path in bare feet, carrying empty plastic jugs. We trek single-file along a ridge, with ochre corn fields sprawling beneath layers of purple hills and mountains, crowned by cerulean sky. To our left, various structures perch along the ridge - roughly hewn, boarded boxes…Read more The Woman at the Well in Haiti

Longing for Home

Blue shadows fall on barren fields where once we roamed heart-to-heart. Now clouds hinge on sinister skies. Grass, tattered earth, flaps like threadbare laundry. Cold and exposed, I drift alone. A weathered fence guides me, hand-over-hand. Nothing tied down, everything shifts in ochre waves. How can I feel trapped in a place so vast? Bare…Read more Longing for Home

Painting A Prayer for Haiti (& a poem)

How my heart cringes on this mountain carcass – mounded bones stripped bare. Flayed flanks decay into ceaseless city striving. Betrayed and battered, you sprawl exposed, miserable, dull with hunger. But I sense something here, yearning at the fringes. Something broods at the frayed edges of this wasteland. Something determined, stubborn, more powerful and pervasive…Read more Painting A Prayer for Haiti (& a poem)

Why I Paint

I could feel the withering of a parched spirit. Aching to reach into the abstract, into the transcendent. To stretch with all my might and drink of the invisible. As of Sunday afternoon, it was my longest break from painting in more than a year. During the previous few weeks, the tactile world around me…Read more Why I Paint

Scars That Tell of the Good Life

With the kind of radiance that hints at secret knowledge of something very deep and very good, Noyo eagerly describes the privilege he feels in serving his native country, Haiti, as a Young Life staff-worker. “Just because something is easy,” he explains, “doesn’t mean it is the best. If you do something easy, it doesn’t…Read more Scars That Tell of the Good Life

A Beautiful Girl in Haiti

Deep in the trenches of poverty and strife, a beautiful girl wearing a white head-band picks her way through garbage and crumbling cement and passes through the gates of Good Shepherd School. In Cite Soleil, the poorest slum of the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, she aspires to something more than she inherited at…Read more A Beautiful Girl in Haiti