“She has, you know…issues.” I hate having “issues.” The dreaded connotation underlying the word implies different, problematic, maybe even burdensome. I hate burdensome. Yet the reality is, we are born with”issues” all but written on our foreheads. Our connotation of “issues” as something negative, a problem, comes from the old English meaning “to flow out […]
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He walked the church aisle past where I sat. A little girl, about two-years-old straddled on his hip, her shoe dangled against his leg. His left arm circled her securely. Another little girl walked next to his other side, her little hand hid inside his big one. Blonde hair hung just below her shoulders. Curls […]
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“But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.” Matthew 15:18 (ESV) When our family moved to Italy and went through the agony of language learning, our children were fluent long before we were. It was the oddest thing to have a seven-year-old, four-year-old and two-year-old blabbering away […]
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The struggle shows in the quiver of a cheek, tremor of lips, and an escaped tear. It comes with a mass of curls shading her face, falling forward with her bowed head. She hides behind its veil. Her chin tucked, she allows the torrent of fear washing over her to be known. Words spoken aloud […]
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“Call me Mara,” Naomi said. Tragedy chiseled her face and spilled from her lips. Pleasant, the meaning of her name no longer fit. Mara, suited her, for it meant “bitter.” “I went out full and came back empty,” Naomi told them. I know many Mara’s, women and men whose lives turned out so very […]
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The question will come. It did for us as she sat on my lap, her baby-soft hand moved my chin to look at her face. Big blue eyes searched mine, “Mom, how did you know Dad was the one?” The question dug into my heart. I knew how important it was to answer right, even though […]
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My grandson screeches around the room, his dark blue cape flies like a flag behind him. “Quick,” he says in a flutter of little feet and hands, “on the couch.” Because of course everyone knows that it takes a couch to make one safe from the wicked beings invading our world. “Get your feet out […]
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What if Tarzan hadn’t married Jane, the tree swinger? What if Tarzan married Penelope who didn’t share the same desire to swing from a tree? What if she had no idea that people killed spiders with their bare hands and then thought it romantic to hold hands. Perhaps she couldn’t fathom killing a creepy-crawly without […]
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“I don’t want them to have a mother like me,” my daughter said. I sat in a heap, shoulders bent, my right side propped against the hospital bed. The children were always on her mind when thought processes were not drugged by the mass on her brain stem, or the drip in her arm, and […]
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I lay on the couch, one eye open and one shut. An ice cube wrapped inside a damp washcloth balanced on my eyebrow. “I weally sorry, Momma,” he said. His face was level with mine, his eye brows bent into a frown. He peered into my face and focused on my wound. He stood so […]
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