This summer has been one long and challenging transition for me. So much has changed in my life over the past 18 months, and I’m still adjusting.   It may take me a while longer.   God is doing good things in my life, to be sure. But sometimes those good things are the result of hard things. I’m feeling a bit glad that the main months of summer have passed, hoping that my internal world will soon begin afresh like that first fallish morning with a hint of frost in the air. For that reason, I’m so glad it’s September.   Yet, I’m reminded that September is...

Let us remember that life is often immersed in tears.”   The Passover Seder leader spoke these words as he dipped parsley into salt water last night, which was Maundy Thursday. In the ceremony, parsley represents new life and new beginnings, but salt water represents the suffering of the Jewish people as slaves in Egypt.   My own eyes stung at these words as I thought of the tears and grief that immersed my life over the past year. I was moved to think that God would include the reality of pain and sadness in a tradition that celebrates life and deliverance. He is a God who understands our...

It is Saturday morning, and quiet, except for the sound of rain splashing out of the gutter into the empty clay flower pots beside the house. I sit at the kitchen table, lit naturally by two great windows and the pale peach glimmer of the candle warming my little white teapot. On the other side of the room, the small window above the sink is open a few inches, letting in the spring-soaked smell of rain and the music of its falling—almost like bells in the distance.     On that windowsill sits a tiny earthen vase containing three mini daffodils. They sing with remembrance of my mother’s...

I awoke this cloudy morning to yellow buds on the mini daffodils I planted in memory of my mom last March. By the time I got home from church and errands this afternoon, a downpour had given way to sunshine, and the daffodils were fully open.     This transition from winter to almost-spring is a fitting picture of life infused with the presence of God. He is the rain that waters seeds of faith in cloudy seasons. He is the hope that flowers after the heart’s winter. He is the spring that brings redemptive life to places of pain.   This weekend I had the privilege to serve and speak at...

Today is the year anniversary of the day my mom took her first breath in heaven. Though I think of her every day, I wanted to do something special as a memorial on this significant day. I wished I could leave a bouquet of daisies, her favorite flower, on her grave, but I live 800 miles away from it.   What, then, to do? I wondered if a ritual of some kind could really matter anyway, since nothing could possibly be an adequate memorial to a lifetime of love, to the rest of a lifetime of deeply felt loss.   Somehow, though, memorial rituals do matter to those who desire them. We got the idea...