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Meet Vivian
Feast your eyes on the charming Vivian. Viv for short. She’s a stunner in an understated, not trying too hard kind of way, don’t you think? We are already quite fond of her. Viv came to join our...
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What we tell ourselves in the white space
I am walking around upstairs on a Tuesday morning. Downstairs I hear Gaga say, “And this is when you went camping in the woods. Do you remember what fun that was?” “Yeah, and me and Sici and J went in...
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Seedling hope
Around the time I hit the difficult days of my early 20′s, I started keeping journals. This was a new thing for me — the journal keeping — for I wasn’t the wistful young girl you might expect. Not the...
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And this makes 100
This is my 100th post on Draw Near. Woohoo. In eight months, I’ve written more pieces than I thought I could release to the wilds of the internet. In spite of fear of failure and rejection, through...
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To Hope
{I’ve been tagged by my talented mama at cooking-spree.com, to write about hope. Messy, beautiful and nonsensical, striving and straining, living and learning hope.} To hope is to watch three girls in...
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11 years later, remembering
I wake to the radio and roll from my left side, belly swollen with the life of our first baby, to my back. Tight and downturned voices say New York City and towers and planes crashing into buildings. I...
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Through dark’s middle
The rain starts with drops like sizzles and soon it is pounding like popping corn on the windshield. I clutch the steering wheel hard, shoulders hunched, wipers on full speed with two of my three...
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Your redemption song
If you’re like me, you long to know that it matters. You long to know that your scrapping and scraping, your saying yes and agreeing with life in a thousand everyday decisions is for something. You...
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Five Minute Friday: Again
So much of life is this repeat. Over and over the same meals. Same routines. Same dialogues. Same challenges. And it can be hard to view it as holy — the everyday mundane moments trickling on past....
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On being boxed in
For the last weeks, Sici’s collected boxes. One fits inside another inside another. She will wrap them in different papers, and her friends will unwrap one at a time, passing the square around the...
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What we say to our children and ourselves in the face of tragedy
I check the email on my phone at about 5:30 on Monday evening — right after we say goodbye to the little friends I watch every Monday and Tuesday — and read the words, “in light of what has happened...
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Permission to dream
Do you feel it rattling, stirring, thumping? Do you recognize it calling from the deep, across the din, through the echoes of these ordinary days? Do you watch as it runs across the hills and soars...
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On dreaming and the good of contradictions
So, I’ve been home for a week and a half from Nebraska and a retreat I do not flippantly call life changing and a game changer and whatever other words mean monumental and encouraged and a little...
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Five Minute Friday: Fall
I hold inside me two seemingly conflicting parts: the dramatic-lay-it-all-out-there-let- your-light-shine-bright side and the sensitive-what-will-they-say-or-think-about-you-if-...
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Cookie dough in the morning – A Concrete Words guest post at Six in the Sticks
Welcome to those joining for the first time today from the blog of the lovely Nacole Simmons at Six in the Sticks. I’m honored to be guest posting there, along with others who are linking up their...
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Doors called hope
I write a bit how I live — with some planning and dedication and a whole lot of flying by the seat of my pants. I work in the scraps and snatches of time I can find between the laundry and the school...
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Why the World Needs your Story, even that Messy One! – Guest Post at The...
I am hungry for stories of redemption. Tales that remind of the purpose in pain, of shining holy work that cuts straight through. I visited a group of inmates at the State Pen last week, and though I...
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Five Minute Friday: Worship
Caleb walks the hall to sit at the side of the man with Hepatitis C, the one everybody expected to die years ago. He keeps fighting, keeps on living, this feisty old man, and Caleb — arms inked, eyes...
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Tend This Seed (31 Days of Right Here: Day 21)
I see the whisper floating from lines. Letters strung “Tend this seed.” This gratitude seed, seed of seeing, seed of tiny graces and mercy — what Brennan Manning calls “the ministry of small things.”...
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A Reset (31 Days of Right Here: Day 23)
Good morning. I thought I’d be sharing with you today the continuation of yesterday’s post about the push and pull of technology, but I’m not. I expect to be back with that tomorrow, sharing words...
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