Around here, and maybe in your back yard too, the crops are drying up. Days are shorter. Evenings are cooler. Sunflowers have bowed their heads and corn stalks have gone crispy. The landscape isn't as lovely as it was this summer, but brown fields mean harvest time is coming. It's a perfect metaphor for the benefits of hanging on in brown and dry seasons of life. Today we have a guest who has written beautifully about "hanging on." My friend and fellow author, Jennifer Dukes Lee is with us today … [Read more...]
When the Story Comes True
It was a story I’d heard all my life, or a version of it anyway. Yesterday, it came true. My grandpa, the same one I wrote about last summer, who’s systematic prayer life explains a lot about my own life, was a storyteller extraordinaire. Besides that, he had learned his mother's tried and true play-it-by-ear piano techniques—major and minor chords, the trilling of an octave, and a jolly be-bopping melody--and when he combined the two, it was a grand performance. But his performances were … [Read more...]
An Easter Ballad for the Day In Between
I can trace my love of imaginative, biblical narrative round and round the grooves of an LP 33 speed record album. Maybe you don’t remember, but a record album (pronounced reh-kerd al-buh-m) was in popular use shortly after the invention of the wheel and hieroglyphics--or so it seems. In the late 70s my parents bought an advanced piece of music technology. A stereo. This miracle of musical machinery was ensconced behind glass doors to reiterate the fact that all the blinking knobs and … [Read more...]
Unlikely Reasons for Gratitude: Change
In 1987 on their debut album, the group Exposé had a song called "Seasons Change." It was a pop culture lament over lost love and time. Thirty years later that song still occasionally gets stuck in my head. "Change" gets a bad rap, especially in the song. But recently I've been really thankful for change. For instance, we’re done with elementary school. We have three--almost 4--drivers in the family. Everyone sleeps. It’s a world away from where I was 12 years ago. In the fall of 2005 I … [Read more...]
Prayer: What difference does it make?
Every morning, for nine days in a row, I listened. My eyes were supposed to be closed, but instead I watched a few left over Wheaties swell and sink in my cereal bowl. In the summer before my freshman year I stayed with my grandparents while they were building a house. Since they were handy, hardworking, and adventurous, they lived in their fifth-wheel camper on the building site during construction. During the day we drove nails, raised walls, and framed up a deck. And by “we” I mean … [Read more...]
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