hope

Courage Not My Own

Someone I dearly love is battling acute mental illness. I am scared, I am overwhelmed. My heart breaks for the one I love. I am trying to be brave. I turn to the One who knows, who keeps track:  of my every tossing through the night, of every wandering of the one I love. I…Read more Courage Not My Own

Blaze

  A long time ago, I stumbled on a meandering meadow path. Vibrant wildflowers exploded, vibrating with hum of bees and butterfly flutter. The promise of joy lured me into the broad expanse. But within a few steps, dark clouds gathered and a mighty wind whipped grasses across my legs. Ominous thunder rumbled. Waves of…Read more Blaze

Ready to Blaze

I crawl out from 2014 feeling a bit battered. Nothing catastrophic. Just the grinding and grating of a persistent challenge that prowls and growls at my heels. At the same time, I grasp for 2015 like a new pair of wings. White and light, bright with hope.  As I reach, I lift up my battered-ness…Read more Ready to Blaze

Lunge for the Light

For the days when leaning for the light is not enough, LUNGE for the light. And even if you fall on the path in the dead of night, surely as the sun rises, its tender rays will find you again.

Digging

Here am I again, where circles end, the dusty place I know at the end of the road. I sink to my knees, furiously dig, past listless grains to deeper pack. Sand, flowing through my fingers, until I hit something hard, solid. I grasp it, wrench it into the light, hold it up to weak,…Read more Digging

Sifted Into Gold

Jesus Predicts Peter’s Denial Luke 22:31-32 “Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” Peter Denies Jesus Luke 22:59-62 Then about an hour later still another…Read more Sifted Into Gold

Rooted in Light

The road from courage and hope, to utter despair, and then finally to exhilaration stretched through wild lands in 2005. With the daughter we longed to adopt buried in a third-world orphanage and silence from the Kenyan lawyer who should be inviting us to come and claim her, I could no longer bear the separation.…Read more Rooted in Light

Prophetic Art

“Art is the language of the soul.” With these words, one of my lifelong friends exhorted me as I wrestled for years with an insatiable need to express myself visually. For decades I tried to suppress this language, feeling it could not urgently or adequately address the evils I witnessed in the world. It felt…Read more Prophetic Art