Good morning... One of the books we are studying in my living room this semester is Margaret Silf's The Other Side of Chaos: Breaking Through When Life Breaks Down. On pages 5 and 6, we read: "Transitions make you ache everywhere. They make you ache, in every joint and muscle and in every brain cell, and in every fiber [...]
Good morning... One line lingers from yesterday's "sue2you" message. "Oh honey, even the saints had spiritual dry spells!" It strikes me that spiritual "dry spells" are not really dry. Actually, dry spells of the Spirit are quite often wet. Wet with weeping. Moist with meaning. Damp with deep desire. Spiritual "dry spells" carry us downstream toward the Savior of [...]
Good morning... Chaos. We hate the word. We hate the experience. We hate her synonyms. Disarray. Jumble. Turmoil. We love her antonyms. Order. Peace. Calm. Yet one line from one book has stayed with me for twenty five years. "Identity is born out of chaos," penned Sue Bender in her 1991 book, Plain and Simple. What does Bender mean? [...]
Good morning... When darkness was upon the face of the deep (Genesis 1:2), one Hebrew word sums up the atmosphere into which God spoke the first light. "Tohu." English words resembling "tohu" describe an experience familiar to many of us. Confusion. Emptiness. Formlessness. Complete chaos. "Tohu's" primeval disorder precedes God's creative activity. Always has. Always will. A trying time [...]
Good morning... How fun it is for my fingertips to listen for the LORD's movement in the early morning hours. As hurricane Hermine exposes the vulnerability of Florida's Gulf Coast, God's winds now blow us back to the start of it all. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, [...]
Good morning... Thanks to a friend of a friend, who is an intake worker at a dog rescue organization, we patiently found our way to our next family member. We are still settling on a name as this eight week old golden retriever/yellow lab pup settles into our home. I have not cared for a puppy or a baby [...]
Good morning... Last week, I went to a women's luncheon at a nearby church. A friend of mine was the main speaker, and I was excited to support her and to hear her talk. As we filed into the exquisitely decorated space, a group of us found our table. I began to sit down at a seat, until I [...]
Good morning... In art class, our eleven-year-old made a telling clay mask. Taped-tight beneath layers of newsprint, she secretly hid it in the garage. Spring cleaning several weeks later, I found the package lying amid odd-and-ends. Still wrapped. Still unexposed. Still hidden. Picking it up, I was surprised by its thick heaviness. “Honey, this has your name on it. [...]
Good morning... If I were a neat freak, I wouldn’t be a writer. If I needed eight hours of sleep every night, I wouldn’t be a writer. If I loved to read, filling my time and my head with words written by others, I wouldn’t be a writer. God made me a messy insomniac, with dyslexic tendencies, so that [...]
