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 [...]
Good morning... In her dream, she is in a large boat snaking through a treacherous river (to get a visual, think about the Colorado River winding through the bowels of the Grand Canyon). There are no other people on the boat, no driver, no companions, yet this huge boat is inching through, seemingly too big for these rarely traveled [...]
Good morning... I was recently reminded of a frightening experience. When our first of four children was born, he was not able to come home from the hospital with us, but instead was taken by ambulance to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania. We were told by our physician that he may have [...]
