We’ve enjoyed receiving the picture cards from our friends around the country, counting blessings and finding the joy of this ______ year. This impossible, unprecedented, ridiculous, frustrating, agonizing, surprising, miraculous year. For the first time in decades, I haven’t had the mental ability to create one of our epic family collage storytelling cards for 2020. Literally it turned into a…
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Somehow my life has always been this way. My world is filled with a lot of people – smart, wise people – who land on all different points on all the spectrums of ideological thought and life-journey decisions. I know many loving, dedicated people who have considered deeply the ways to prioritize the factors of their own life and make…
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I am terrible at secrets. If there’s a surprise planned, my kids have generally learned that I should only be told what is safe to leak, which I would offer is strategically helpful for the sophisticated surprise planner. I’m an open book, unless it’s a matter of privacy or there’s an NDA somewhere. In broad terms, I’ve become a freak…
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Physiologically speaking, our bodies are miracles of growth and healing. When we get a cut on our finger, the white blood cells in our body rush to the site to increase cell production and heal the injury. This is a simple metaphor for community, right? The advanced science of our physical make-up is often relatable to the needs we have…
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Christmas Day 2019 One Husband, one Ex-Husband, Three Millennials with a Z-er, and a Whole Bunch of Grace. “But it’s really pretty great,” I say. Many wide-eyed, sometimes horrified people react in wonder and shock as I share the story of our Christmas Day. It’s not unusual any more for my husband and my ex-husband to be sharing a [non-alcoholic] toast…
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When I found out I was pregnant at 41, there was an element of physical fear, for sure. After all, my girlie-parts were supposed to be winding down, weren’t they? And my husband was completely sterile from cancer treatment 10 years prior. (About which my more savvy girlfriends chided, “uh, you fell for that?”) This wasn’t supposed to be possible…
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What do you do with your critical mind? It might be a mental spectrum particular to a certain set of conditions; either innate or learned. Perhaps legalism, alcoholism, duplicity, perfectionism, (etc.) all play a role in creating this pattern in our brains. Let’s take a fun little jaunt across a potential* spectrum of our human critical mind. Trust me, I’m…
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Throughout their lives, as our kids have faced new challenges – moving to new cities with new schools and youth groups and sports teams – as well as launched into new lives at college and beyond, we’ve repeatedly shared this story with them to paint a simple picture of life. You could say it’s one of our family’s folk tales.…
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Last Thursday evening, my husband and two youngest kids and I met up with 7 other people we didn’t know, climbed into a van with our duffel bags and our good intentions and drove to the border town of Mexicali Mexico to build something. I’d been busy enough in the weeks leading up to our departure that I quietly panicked…
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Four weeks post-op. No cancer. No girlie parts on the inside. My tummy full of foreign objects is now a cave of emptiness (or so I imagine). I’ve had 2 follow up Doctor visits and I keep hearing how great I’m doing. I think a doctor’s point of view has a much wider contextual range than I do for my…
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There isn’t a precise moment when you can see it happen. Only that he has grown. It’s not an abrupt shift, and could possibly only be observed through a time lapse filming, like the BBC’s Planet Earth footage of a flower blooming or a sunrise from space. It is as dramatic and beautiful as that, too. Truly the bloom, the…
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If we try to hide our children from controversial content, they may not learn to think for themselves about important issues they’ll face throughout their life. If we try to force our own views on them without demonstrating openness to always-new ways of seeing people, we might miss a chance to teach and learn the mightiest of skills ourselves. If…
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Lest I neglect completely my humble yet therapeutic, personal yet pseudo-public journal of womanly gymnastics of the mental order, I find today an opportunity to celebrate a beautiful jaunt through another, not-yet-actual friend’s interpretation of a childhood favorite. Not my childhood particularly, unless of course, you consider the Warner Brothers version of said favorite childhood tale. I have only another…
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Recently I had the privilege of hearing two brilliant pastors on different ends of the country speak – live – and directly to me as if they had read the whole messy complicated backstory before their talk began. First, I listened to Pastor Jim Samra’s teaching all the way from our former church in Michigan (thanks to live web streaming)…
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Time works hard. 15 years ago I heard the expression “all in God’s time,” and as a confirmed control freak, I was quite intrigued with this mystery. I was painstakingly seeking the truth of God, flip-flopping around the structures of religion and new age fads, so the notion of “God’s timing” as something beyond my control was new. I remember…
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How can a heart soar and cringe all at the same time? As a mom of a wide range of kids, I should know this sensation all too well by now. For Pete’s sake, my 21 year old recently sent a photograph of his body practically dangling over the far edge of a cliff along the Oregon coast. Rude and…
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We’re now in the middle of our move. Half of us are here in Southern California and half of us are still back in Michigan. The half of us living in LA is hanging out in a Residence Inn and managing lots of new-life, people who don’t know us, or no people at all. The two of us still in…
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Sometimes when we forge new paths, we find footprints we ourselves left decades earlier. Our family is moving back to Southern California from the serene and naturally beautiful Western edge of the mitten state. (Hold up your left hand.) I spent my childhood in Michigan, so I have a deep fondness for the lakes and the uniqueness of this state’s…
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It’s true. We’ve taken the leap and accepted great career roles in a far-away city. Our family now begins the physical and emotional relocation process that will require giant shifts in our experiences as a family, and as tiny people on a big planet. People sometimes reveal their own experiences – or fears – with their reactions to the uprooting…
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Around here, of late, I have been referred to as “Eva.” Over the years, my husband has habitually watched certain movies and announced “she’s just like YOU!” He has too-kindly compared me to Sandra Bullock’s character in The Blind Side (though I’ve never had the wherewithal or sidearm the likes of Leigh Anne Tuohy). And on a good day, I’ve…
