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Engaging Poverty
One always looks for the way out of pain and crisis, because sitting in the crisis and feeling the pain seem unendurable. We don’t examine our situation, look into what brought us to the crisis, and upgrade our philosophy of life. We don’t grow.
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Perspective
Last week, I accompanied my son to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he’ll experience what’s known as “plebe summer,” an intense and grueling introduction to military life that precedes the academic year. We walked across the still campus together at 6:00 a.m., for he had been ordered to report for his…
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Doing the Work
Life isn’t fair and there is no observable grand scheme for rewarding good and punishing evil in the temporal world. Those who are good, generous, and even innocent can and do suffer beyond measure.
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Tendrils
This is the way things are now that my husband is dead. I don’t know how they will be in the future. I only know how they are now: they’re difficult and terrible, and my loneliness is intense even while surrounded by family and friends. They all have one another, and they have me; but…
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From the Darkness
Every break, every dissolution, everything that comes to an end after a time is part of the inner process of transformation. What changes outside changes the inside.
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In Case of Emergency
When an emergency occurs or we are given terrible news, or something in our world shifts to threaten our survival, we find ourselves plummeting from zenith to nadir in short order.
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Broken
December, January, and February are terrible months for me. They are months I spend nearly all my energy on necessary enslavement to seasonal demands that call on my most inferior functions to step up and do their duty. I do it every year with the peevishness of a colicky baby, but this particular year I’ve…
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Cheated
cheat (v.): 1. to defraud; swindle. 2. to deceive; influence by fraud. 3. to elude; deprive of something expected. Some years ago, my husband’s grandfather died, leaving his heirs land and other property worth millions of dollars. Before his death, my husband and his granddad had walked this land that had been in the family since the…
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Being There
One of my dearest friends lost her 28-year-old son-in-law to cancer yesterday. He and his wife, her daughter, celebrated their three year wedding anniversary only four months ago. These two kids spent almost half their marriage dealing with cancer. Imagine that. I don’t mind telling you that my husband and I conducted their wedding and…
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Wasp
Church friends who had been abandoning, shallow, or indifferent during Olivia’s illness and death had made me think deeply about what it actually means to be a Christian. Christ-ian: One who is like Christ.
The Third Eve 