Time

I’m a hanger-on. I hang onto things…memories, old receipts, friendships, bad song lyrics. There’s good and bad in hanging on.

“The stripped and shapely maple grieves

the ghosts of her departed leaves”

John Updike’s poem, “November,” in A Child’s Calendar, chimes to me the beginning of the holiday season: the over-eating of Thanksgiving, the frenzy of Advent, the bone-deep joy of Christmas, and the excitement of Epiphany all begin after this reminder that all gain is loss. All loss is gain. And we are the better for it.

This fall has been a lovely one in our lower Arkansas Valley of Colorado. Ours is never the glamour autumn of New England, but this year the river bottom turned flaming yellow, the backyard trees orange and lighter brown, and the leaves crunched under my feet on my slow morning jogs in City Park. [Read more…]

It’s a story I’ve told a hundred times, maybe more. I was young and broke, with an unpaid emergency room bill hanging over my head. The hospital had just called, threatening to send the charges to a collection agency. I was sitting on the floor, in tears, begging God for an answer, when the phone rang again. It was a friend and co-worker, calling to finalize plans for a girls’ night out.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, hearing the shake in my voice and the too-loud sniff.

I told her.

“How much do you owe?” I told her.

“Oh, I’ve got that. I’ll give it to you, and you can just pay me back.” God answered my prayer in an instant of grace.

But, in truth, in order to answer that prayer, God had to have set in motion a whole series of events leading up to that instant. God led [Read more…]

Letting go

All the befores, durings, and afters

Bible Verse of the Day