conversation with God

Me: Right now, everything feels precarious and changeable. Sometimes I feel like time, and with it my life, is slipping away from me. Why do I feel so out of control? Him: Are you ever in control? Me: No. But you usually let me feel like I am. Him: Isn’t it better to know the [...]

checking my baggage

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). I read this verse the other day and later, maybe while I was washing dishes or in the shower (I don’t remember exactly), I thought about it again. We often use the term “baggage” to describe past [...]

good girls need [a lot of] grace, too

I’m in the middle of a book called Grace for the Good Girl by Emily P. Freeman. The subtitle is “letting go of the try-hard life.” Let me tell you: this book resonates with me. I grew up “good.” I had a happy family life, PG-rated at most. I fell in with a sheltered crowd [...]

to know and be known

Blogging is akin to stepping out from stage left and standing in front of an audience you can’t see because of the blinding lights in your eyes. You don’t know how many people are out there, and you’re paralyzed with fright. Writing should be conversational, people say, but writing is not always a conversation. Sometimes [...]

Audrey brightens my sick day

I know, I know. This is becoming one of those blogs that is mostly abandoned, and only surfaces with song lyrics or quotations. I suppose I have forgotten that people read this, and instead have been using it to preserve words that mean something to me. Perhaps soon I will again write my own words [...]

this song is how I feel…

…to some extent. It especially matches my recent sense that true change comes from within us. Changing circumstances definitely alter us, yes; but lasting change? It comes from inside. Ultimately, it comes from the power of God, but that flows from the inside out. I think a lot of people wait for outward circumstances to [...]

the wise Mr. Lewis

More quotations, this time from Mere Christianity, which I am only now reading. I’ve read a shortened version with the first half, but this is my first time through the entire book. Shocking! It is also shocking, in the most sarcastic of senses, that I am delighting in the chance to heavily underline my own [...]

the antichrist

One more quote from Eugene Peterson’s Reversed Thunder, which I finished reading tonight. I love what he says here, and am recording it for my own benefit. After I’d finished reading the final page, I started to close the book and then thought, No. I’m going to post this quote on my blog so that [...]

listening

This seems to be turning into a Eugene Peterson quotation blog, I know, but his writing strikes me with beauty and ideas. I’m still reading Reversed Thunder, and when I read this passage the other evening it reminded me strongly of a post I wrote in 2008, with a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that travels [...]