2014
It was a long week.
Penny, my eight-year old daughter, was on spring break. William (5) and Marilee (3) were not. My husband Peter was out of town. So I decided to pull William and Marilee from school and go to the Connecticut shore, where we have a family beach house. ...
Last week I returned from the Festival of Faith and Writing, a conference that is just what it sounds like, populated by writers and readers and people of faith. For people like me this constitutes a taste of heaven. Being at the Festival gave me a chance to think about why ...
Just before Jesus died, according to Matthew and Mark, he cried out in a loud voice, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It's a question that has rung out ever since, as Jesus' followers continue to wonder exactly why he uttered this "cry of ...
So much pain. I was at what should have been the prime of life. Med school finished, internship and residency done. Two kids and a wonderful wife at home. But there was so much pain.
I was a rheumatologist practicing in Roanoke, Virginia when I began to have discomfort ...
I'm starting to feel like an old lady. I shook my head at Miley Cyrus at the MTV Music Awards and at Beyonce's performance for the 2013 Super Bowl halftime show. I went out for a drink with friends on my 37th birthday, and we talked for an hour about how to protect ...
I'm in Grand Rapids at the Festival of Faith and Writing as I write, and my head is swimming with new books to read and new ideas to consider, and that's only after hearing four speakers/panels on the first day. But it strikes me that I ought to talk about books today ...
It's been six years since the beginning of the Great Recession. Six years of conversations about unemployment, underemployment, mortgage-backed securities, and millions of Americans who have seen their fortunes fall. Six years of bemoaning Wall Street. Six years of reports ...
Repent sounds like such a religious word, like street preachers shouting, like moralists wagging fingers. But I learned a long time ago that the literal translation of "repent" is to turn around. "Hey, buddy, you're headed in the wrong direction"—that ...
"If people in your community are going to Wal-Mart in their wheelchairs but not coming to your church, a lot of times the church community calls them shut-ins. They're not shut-ins; they're just shut out of the church" (Ned Stoller (cited in Making Churches ...
I first happened upon Micha Boyett's blog, then called The Mama Monk, a few years ago. A young mother trying to figure out how to reimagine her life as a Christian now that she had small children and housework rather than "official ministry" to do, a young mother ...
On Monday of this past week I hit "send" and submitted the final final final draft of my manuscript for my next book, Small Talk: Learning from my Children about What Matters Most. It's a book filled with thoughts and questions that my children have asked or ...
I think of myself as a rather laissez faire parent. I believe in germs and dirt. My kids, including my three-year old, go outside and play without my immediate supervision. When they fall down, I wait to make sure they are really truly hurt before I comfort them (like when ...
Last Friday, Pope Francis broke with tradition when he knelt down at a confessional in public view and gave his confession to an ordinary priest. Typically the Pope confesses in private, but after preaching a sermon in which he talked about our common sinfulness, he also ...
It had been more than a year since we last buried a child. And though we all knew it would eventually happen again, it felt like an especially hard blow. When the time came, Special Hope Network had existed in Lusaka, Zambia, for close to four years and we had been serving ...
Peter and I took Penny and William, our two older kids, to see Frozen in the theater in January. I was nearly as excited as the children. I had read the endless praise, including the writer who called it the best Disney movie since The Lion King (which I saw four times in ...
2015
