In homes where wealth
Is relabeled need,
And we think no one knows
We’ve simply redefined greed;
Our hearts grow colder,
Our hands serve slower,
And the songs of freedom are forgotten
By the descendents of those
Who built bonfires to light their way
In the new and unknown world.
That part of my parent’s marriage, the part where they made promises to God as well as each other, was the foundation, glue, and strength that united our family together. No matter where each of us has been, is going, believes or rejects, the covenant that tied mom and dad to each other and a divinity that reached beyond their own capacities, also tied my siblings and I to one another. That bond continues to this day, though mom and dad have both been gone for over 5 years. How grateful I am for their choice, and for their efforts to be true to it always.
“We gather these ghosts and scatter them through the house, October remembrances of a hopeful May, and settle in again to the season of stories.”
“I love the early September leaves, dry at the tip, just beginning to brown and curl as the apples and pears bend the branches down and make it easier for small hands to grasp the treasure the leaves have been holding.”
“The middle of nowhere,” I say,
“And the center of everything.”
The place I’m always heading,
No matter how far I go.
This is a short blog about high hopes. A story of education, agriculture, and how small increments of generosity can yield tremendous harvests in the lives of impoverished families a world away.
Life flourishes,
The earth expands,
And heaven reaches down,
In rain and dew,
In response to your wings.
“If there is work still undone in any of those areas then it is our work to do. On this Veteran’s Day I can’t help but feel that the best way to honor the men and women who sacrificed their lives, youth, bodies, and minds for the ideals of freedom, is to ensure that they didn’t sacrifice in vain.”
“I wish all eulogies could be so wonderfully real. We’re born in the honesty of physical nakedness, I wish we could all die in emotional nakedness, with forgiveness following us on our journeys.”
Share To the Mother of Her Who My Child Loves by Vernie Lynn […]
“Today was a Day Two kind of day. I felt the weight of sorrow and the comfort of hope. It was a day to be human and to be grateful for salvation. It was gloriously messy and real. And through it all I felt sustained and comforted by a Savior who has been through such a day as this. One who knows the compassion and enduring peace and love that waits on the morning of the third day.”
“I AM you and we were slaying dragons before the world was. You NEED to remember it.”
“No matter what we’re experiencing it will change with the passage of time. What is of greatest importance then, in a world where both the view and vantage point are so changeable?
Knowing where to look.”
“Is this call,
To come unto Him,
The invitation to our own
Nativity?
An opportunity for rebirth and
Becoming
A new people,
Keeping a new covenant
And ushering in
A new world.”
“I imagine that she too had to remind herself that it wasn’t all dirty nappies, dirty dishes, dirty floors, fingers, and faces. That somewhere in the mundaneness of it all the work of God was happening. That somewhere in her offering of home, food, learning, and love there was something that would come close to the divinity within him. That somehow in all her mortal weakness there would be something that would help him in the work he would someday perform.”
“Because feeling weak is just an idea,
Like worry, or fear, or hope.
And ideas can change
The course of history,
And my own mind.
So while I breathe
And while I stand
Upon the ground instead of lie within it,
I’ll earn that obituary.”
Choice, the capacity to utilize our free will, only happens when we have at least two options to choose between. Those who proclaim the all-encompassing importance of free choice, while condemning those who offer the opportunity to make a choice, or who take offense when an option they don’t want is offered to them, epitomize hypocrisy. They want the freedom to choose their path, but are ready to cast stones at those who offer or choose another. That’s not a defender of liberty. That’s a demagogue parading as a patriot.
“The name she goes by in each part of our family doesn’t seem to matter much; it is what the name has come to mean that has made all the difference. “
I picked up my fork and went to work beside him on the hillside, blood and sweat mingling under the Midwestern sun. He smiled at me and threw another thistle. “Farms and people need caretakers,” He said.
“I want to earn my eulogy. So someday in my children’s past, They’ll remember me as I wished I could be.”
“There’s another element, a base that underpins the actions, which is proving more and more to be the secret to happiness. And it’s not something you do so much as it is how you see the world.”
ShareLittle Ethel: A Christmas Story of Faith and Family (From the book “Walking […]
“Gratitude doesn’t change our problems, it changes our perspective on our problems. God didn’t just want gratitude FROM me, He wanted gratitude FOR me, because He knew that living in gratitude is how I could get through difficult times, painful experiences, and transform sorrow into personal growth.”
To color his barrier to success and wealth With the threat of death.
To throw down his worst and call it my best. To claim equal if I Step down where he stands. Beneath me where he lives, Outside of Eden, That lone, cold man.
And reason bids me obey
The law-giving Jehovah,
With the exact obedience
Of the law-living Christ.
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“I turn at the latch to see her,
Standing old, broken and creaking in places,
The weight of faith alone
To keep her still standing…”
“…She doesn’t know yet,
Not in the extremity of her discomfort,
Where all the sick, all the mess, all the need
Goes when it leaves her body, her mouth,
Her heart.
She doesn’t see how it sticks to you…”
And when you discover,
As we all have done,
That life is balanced between the love and fear,
The hope and the despair,
The questions and the faith,
We will be there to hold you, lift you,
Carry your heart, and tend your soul
With our tears, laughter, and love.
“This is what love looks like when you make room in your heart for the one you love to struggle, suffer, grow and change, and still have a place there. Middle age is the birthplace of lifelong lovers.”
We look for the big events in our lives to label miracles. The deus ex machina events that sweep into our lives and save us from our situations. But that hasn’t been my experience with miracles.
“She wondered if there weren’t other places where a woman’s body could be bound up, bound to, and broken, controlled, made small, and crippled.”
“It is my sincere hope that loyalty becomes a defining factor in our hearts and in our society. I see too much of separation, disinterest, and self-interest in the world. I see individuals who are so dedicated to their own progression and success that they forget that they are not solitary travelers in this world. I see people so hurt by the betrayal of false friends that they become afraid to offer loyalty again. But we must. We must reach sideways, regardless of rejection, again and again if necessary, until we become truly united in heart and mind.”
We are free to be full of love no matter who is full of fear. Free to be kind no matter who has been unkind to us. Free to be compassionate no matter who has hurt our hearts. Free to chase our dreams no matter who has told us that they are impossible…
I used red filters a lot in my class. I like the contrast. I love the definition of my subjects when I used the red. I loved how it made the eyes pop, the clouds become mysterious, and the rocks become magical with their shapes and shadows. Using a red filter didn’t change the world, it just increased my capacity to see it clearly. Kind of like…rose colored glasses.
That’s the power of a story. It can take you forward and backward and sideways in time. You can be 9 years old one moment, 45 the next, and something that happened 96 years ago can be relevant in this moment and change your life in a way you never expected. Stories are the intersections of lives lived hundreds, thousands, entire ages of years apart. A single place where we stand fixed in an eternity that moves around us, ever changing and expanding.
Down by the shoreline, Down by the sea, The sky meets the water, The sand, and me.
Healing Through Farming: How the Earth is Our Common Ground
“I sing for the women who bled enough on their crops to feed nitrogen to hungry greens. Not enough each day to die only once, but enough over years to fill a family, a posterity, a Homeland.”
Something in the words that speak From blossom, bud, and dusty fruit Between the sky and dampened earth, Creations be of the Creator’s seed, They sing the story of ourselves, Storytellers from our very birth.
I breathe in, breathe out. The wind moves the orb where I lie And speak of the beauty, throw sparks at the bright, Weaving a story by day and night From threads, such fine, fine threads I spin.
I wait for the day when your picture inspires more than grief. When the joy comes back from six feet deep…
Sometimes realizing a dream is all about having the eyes to see that it’s already come true.
In that hope I felt seen, I felt understood, I felt loved, and I felt forgiven. At last, at long, long last I remembered what it felt like to have a hope in Christ. To be recognized as imperfect, but loved so perfectly. To be taken in with all my flaws but to be given the atonement so flawlessly. To be recognized in my unbelief and doubt but to be compensated for my lack with an overflowing faith.
“But no matter where the pumpkin rests, the farmer will always love it best
As a bit of Sunshine captured in shell of Gold or orange and tended well.”
“That’s how death is. We close the casket. We fold the flag. We make that last radio call. We weep, we breathe deep, and we walk away from the dead back to those who still live. And each step kills something inside us because Ben should still be here. Right here walking beside us.”
My spirit
Quiet in the cacophony
Of the birth, decay, and growth
Of being.
The song that perched within my soul
And sang from branches high
Has flown to trees on higher peaks
And left my heart behind.
“The worshipped has become
The pilgrim; straining, burning, dying,
For a chance to change
What is written in the stars.”
We don’t have the luxury of proclaiming “not MY problem”, “not MY President”, “not MY America”. Like it or not, this is OUR America and the blame for our division lies at all of our feet.
“I had no idea how emotional existing in that “moment” would be. Everything I am was right there with me in that space. I was wrapped up in wondering whether or not I could keep going, if I could keep my promise to myself to cross the finish line…”
“For some inexplicable reason our culture expects that the elderly experience a different kind of grief. As if age makes the death of a spouse, and that loss of a sexual relationship, expected and therefore somehow “less”. Those widowed are supposed to accept it with grace and wait patiently for their turn to die. Alone.”
“Then a lone cricket starts playing his tune into the dark silence.
It makes me feel wonderfully small and inconsequential to mark time with a cricket…”
Share In light of the ongoing (and honestly, ad nauseum) bathroom gender discussions, […]
“The fingers of shadow lengthen
Along the quiet bend
Of the road that runs from East to West
Beside the grave of a friend.”
The overweight. The obese. The chubby. The fat. The plump.
These are the untouchables in America.
Disbelief, by comparison, is just so blessedly easy. All it requires is our disinterest, our contempt, or our anger. Anger is easy compared to kindness.
ShareThis poem was written just a few days after my firstborn son was […]
Let me pose this question to you: say I accept your assertion as truth, that my vote is “wasted” on a 3rd party candidate, are you as equally vehement that I should vote for the “other” candidate? Will you feel better then about my vote not being lost?
“The bedrock of our civilization rests upon the shaky sand of self-awareness and is dependent not upon how well we speak, but upon how well we listen.”
ShareThis morning I came across this image: On this blog post: https://feminewbie.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/i-just-saw-this-picture-and-im-so-disturbed-because-its-me/ This was […]
A good, clean debate can strengthen understanding. An argument leaves you feeling sick inside.
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With total understanding of what the gospel of Christ is really about she replied, “Church isn’t for perfect people, church is for everybody.”
“I knew when I went home that day that I wanted to be a writer. I knew that I wanted to be the one who wove the magic into the words and reached into another person’s heart to touch it with emotion.”
It’s good to remember, when the “right now” looks impossible or insurmountable, that there have been better days and there will be better days, and I will get through them and still have these snapshots of the best moments of my life during what feels to be the worst days of my life.
I will do my part to defend the freedom I treasure because I know it is not enough to simply remember; I must act, I must do, I must serve so that the terrible price that you paid is not lost to neglect and apathy.
Nothing of our hard work remained.
Ezekiel and William stood side by side in front of me. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could hear the heartbreak in Ezekiel’s voice when he finally turned to William, tears in his eyes and asked, “Why dad? Why did God let our garden get destroyed? We worked so hard on it, why did he let this happen?”
All things break.
It is the law of the earth that the grandest mountains eventually come to dust and the sweetest of dreams-come-true make their way to memories.
It is the law of Heaven that we come to understand why.
To understand that joy is born in the breaking.
“…I close my eyes at journey’s end, and sit beneath the shade.
The heat of travel flows from my fingertips and toes to the soil beneath me,
The earth returns a cool stillness in trade.
I open my eyes to the golden touch of sundown.
The last rays illuminating the treasure I have traversed.
There is no hurry in me now and so I remember…”
I had forgotten Brother Tingey, his kindness, his generosity, his strength of spirit; Brother Tingey had forgotten himself, his wife, their life together, and his family; but there was someone who had never forgotten him. Through the simplicity of a song and the imperfect voices of a group of teenage girls Brother Tingey was reminded that he was still a Child of God.
ShareNot Everyone is Educated: a Response to Nathan Biberdorf I have been […]
“I can tell you beyond any doubt that God hears our prayers and He answers them. He doesn’t take away our troubles, but He gives us joy in the midst of them. He doesn’t make us comfortable, but He gives us the chance to comfort others and find respite from our own woes through service. He always answers our prayers, but not always in the moment that we pray.”
Share The summer I turned twenty-one I was invited to be a camper […]
So this is my version of free-time. “Me” time. And I’m inviting you to share it with me.
I’ll be posting the 6 words every Sunday night.
ShareA friend of ours was at the Clackamas Town Center Mall yesterday when […]
God sees precious things in us. Sometimes our meager efforts must look just like a chipped, faux-gold painted, plaster bowl. But he takes them anyway, He loves them because he loves us
ShareThere is a line in Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” that has been […]
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