I remember too clearly, last June, sitting in a John Hopkins Urology doctor’s room, a catheter strapped to my leg and fear strapped to my heart. The urologist came in, briefly glanced at the computer, and then asked me, how did this happen?
In that moment so many scenes spun through my mind. The waking up to a wet bed, the too slow recovery from emergency surgery, all the ER trips- 4 in 6 weeks. Scenes of blood all over … continue reading
You can’t capture a sunset.
Just like you can’t capture the God glimpses and the almost-breakthroughs and the intimate moments of clarity.
You can’t capture a sunset, but you try, and you take the picture but the pixels are never enough, it’s never fully there. And so sunset pictures come with disclaimers that declare it was better than this. Redder than this, deeper than this, more than this. I couldn’t capture it- the disclaimers make that clear. Because we … continue reading
The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.
Sometimes doing both rather suddenly.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
It’s January. Bitter cold, and quite fitting. Memories of last January are hard to shake. The New Year had been very naively planned out and anticipated. As the month continued, plans were halted, changed, new plans laid, and then all plans shattered all in a roller coaster we never saw coming. On the last day of that previous December, something … continue reading
January. Memes and memories and marches.
January, the month of losing my first baby, of first becoming a Hope Mommy, of labor pains that contracted my soul.
It was a Saturday, the day of the March for Life, my Facebook feed a platform for the full humanity of the tiniest one.
I was 5 and 1/2 weeks pregnant.
I read about the shocking development that happens at only 4 weeks gestation, I saw the pictures and drawings and watched countless … continue reading
For too long the place I fought the tears the hardest was church. It’s perplexing, isn’t it, but this is often the case with many. The music plays, the verses recited, the Spirit touches. And the tears beg to come.
Then the cheek is bit, the leg pinched, the eyes blink. Instead of allowing the holy work to press the grief, my mind races to anything it can to wage war on my emotions.
Why is this? What is it … continue reading
“We are not adrift in chaos.” I hear Elisabeth Elliot say it often as I replay her words in my mind. Her lectures on suffering were an integral part of my journey last year, when the mind was muddy and heart too broken, and words of truth needed. Not just any truth-filled words, but one that came from a voice that knew the path of suffering.
Elisabeth Elliot certainly earned that position. Sixty-three years ago yesterday, her first husband, Jim … continue reading