Store shelves lay empty. Barren, skewed and aimless, like Old Mother Hubbard’s Cupboards. Or like the day after Black Friday. How was I supposed to buy shoes for my five-year-old daughter when I couldn’t find any anywhere? Worse yet, my fifteen-year-old had suggested she needs a heavier winter coat. She has many, but most were for […]
When You Need a Harvest in Winter
The longest day of the year. That’s what they call today. Winter. Dark. Even darker than the usual darkness of this Northwest tip of the nation I live in; the one where artists and creatives are born, and legends are formed by the emotion of winter. The valley, where trees block the sun, dark clouds hide […]
When Grief Hits and Labels Try to Limit Us, in the Isle of the Grocery Store
I nearly collapsed, when I turned to see giant chocolate bars lining an end isle. It was a casual grocery store stroll, just me and my husband. We were looking for piniatta’s for our daughter’s fourth and fifth birthdays. They were born three days and one year apart. Who would guess when we were fifty, we […]
When You Are Traveling on a Broken Road
The world is an expert at advise. Walk into any bookstore and you can see the shelves lined with how-to’s, need-to’s, and have-to’s. We’ve become unsympathetic to others dark valleys, but increasingly reflective and exaggerated about our own inner dwellings. We keep company with a world holding magnifine glasses to our every flaw, our open scars, […]
When You Wait and Wait, But Still Can’t See His Promises Fulfilled
Imagine being one hundred years old. The body that once ran and leaped, twisted and turned, now infertile, barren, “dead”. “Dead” was the description God gave both Abraham and Sarah’s body. And yet, Abraham clung to a promise, the promise that “numerous would be” his descendents. (Romans 4:18) There are times in our lives where we […]
When Skies go Dark, there is a Promise; He is For You
Rays of light dart to the ground, through the smoke-colored clouds painted upon the sky. A thin layer of lower stratus lines whisp speedily in time with, “The Blessing”, a song on my car radio, declaring His goodness upon a thousand generations. And I struggle with words sometimes. Struggle, in the storm, to hold down a […]