This isn’t the resurrection I expected. The thought assailed my mind last night, unbidden and dangerous-sounding, fringed as it was with, at best, sulky ingr...

“Well, mama,” my 8-year-old daughter began, shrugging. “At least God still knows how many hairs are on your head!” I stared dejectedly at the snarl of hair tw...

My neighbor, Kay, is transferred to a nursing home after her hospital stay, a surprisingly spacious room but one with a roommate who has dementia and cries a...

“I trade my secrets one by one, lessening my burden, reclaiming praise. Every day I say I AM, let thanks cleanse my mouth. A body shouts my fugue in the hous...

I never had to consider death before, never had to witness its relentless impinging on life. Now it’s all I see. I help my elderly neighbor rise from her cha...

I walk out to the mailbox and pull out an envelope with a now-familiar stamp on the back, alerting me that it has been sent from a correctional facility. I o...

I notice the broody hen first because I fear she’s gone missing, eviscerated stealthily in the night by some accursed varmint from among the animals I would ...

It is so strange, what triggers grief. The morning after poison ivy welts began to appear on my forehead and arm I woke up to a swollen and distorted face in...

I wasn’t paying attention the moment my dad actually died. I just realized the room was silent, a hideous silence, the sudden absence of his labored, glottal...

“Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.” – Frederick Buechner We walk to the car, her an...

I sit alongside my mother in the funeral parlor two days after Lia’s death, this new terrible upside-down world springing into hideous bas-relief while I num...

Ever since my ever-so-gentle literary rejection, I’ve been struggling with what to do with my manuscript. Do I relegate it to indefinite languishment on a mu...

The summer I turned 15, I went to my one and only church camp. I wish I could say I was transformed there, that an altar call drew me forward, trembling and ...

“I just don’t understand,” I wailed, and sucked in a phlegmy breath for the rambling and Scripturally reckless run-on sentence which followed: “I’ve prayed a...

A few nights before my dad died we were gathered around him, wondering just how close the end was. I was playing hymns for him on my phone, and we were singi...

“I think Jesus was a woman. That’s what I believe." She says it plainly, boldly, her eyes smoldering with the heady drug of open defiance. I’m unfazed, tho...

I heard His voice for the first time when I was out of my mind on acid, tripping hard, as the parlance went back then: I sat at the window of my city apart...

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be ...

I thought I would open by sharing some of my dad’s classic sayings and expressions. They won’t be nearly as funny in my voice, but perhaps you can imagine ...