Good morning... After reading yesterday's post, One Sacred Moment, our friend Cathy Smith described to me a beautiful experience. Her daughter, Abby, journeyed with cancer for five years before going to heaven at age seven. With Cathy's permission, I share with you her story. ****** When we were on Abby's Make a Wish trip after she had first relapsed [...]
Good Morning... As I walked the beach last summer, I saw tons of broken seashells. Picking up various shells, I noticed their unique beauty, their one-of-a-kind shape, texture, color. I wondered with each, “What story do you have to tell?” Weathering. The word weathering filled my mind. To weather is to bear up against and come safely through trouble [...]
Good Morning... Being the first awake at our writers' retreat offers a plethora of pleasures. I embody Richard Foster's quote: my "spirit is on tiptoe - alert and listening." The air is dark. Alone time, peaceful. Quiet rings in my ears as I perch on the open-air porch, filling my open-blank journal. What is that sound? Critters rub their [...]
Sometimes we live too up-close to people. We hang on the bumper of our loved ones, directing. We hang on the bumper of our enemies, raging. Enmeshed, we try to fix, save, change each other. Tailgating, we engender co-dependency, an intensely emotional form of loving and hating. Given a slight break in life's bumper to bumper traffic, a truck [...]
Happy Mother's Day... "Every year my children ask me the same question," wrote a mother on her Facebook page. "After thinking about it, I decided I'd give them my real answer." She continued: "What do I want for Mother's Day? I want you. I want you to keep coming around. I want you to bring your kids around. I [...]
Good morning... In my message yesterday morning, I honored my faithful friend Julie Harlan and by mid afternoon I got word that Julie had passed on to heaven. Her husband's words posted earlier this week have met their sequel. Chad wrote on Julie's CaringBridge page, "EVERYONE wonders how this rare form of cancer could happen to a healthy, fit, [...]
Sometimes we live too up-close to people. We hang on the bumper of our loved ones, directing. We hang on the bumper of our enemies, raging. Enmeshed, we try to fix, save, change each other. Tailgating, we engender co-dependency, an intensely emotional form of loving and hating. Given a slight break in life's bumper to bumper traffic, a truck [...]
Good morning... I pre-programmed my past two posts before I went on our weekend Writers' Retreat at a friend's mountain home near Lake Rabun. As I crafted the words about trees on my street changing at different rates and the painful-looking experience of naked, barren limbs, I had no idea how real these words would become over the next [...]
Good morning... Jesus says, "...The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life," says John 4:14b in the Message translation. My brain wonders, "What is an artesian spring?" Googling, I learn that "artesian" is the upward movement of water under hydrostatic pressure from beneath the earth's surface. Spring water under "artesian" pressure gushes [...]
Good morning... I went to a movie with one of my best girlfriends this weekend. Miss You Already, starring Drew Barrymore, is very moving, raw and real. The story chronicles the journey of two lifelong friends, through flawed relationships and infertility, through cancer and childbirth, through love that hurts and love that heals. Many in the theater were quietly [...]
