Life in the Slow Lane

For years I avoided the thought of marriage because living it well seemed impossible for a person like me. I am a person easily overwhelmed by hardship, sorrow, suffering and evil. The only way I could be comfortable with the enormity of the life-long commitment to have and to hold, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, was to tuck my wedding day right up close to Easter as a reminder that God raises the dead, the hopeless, the sorrowing, the repentant.  Only in the stirrings of Palm Sunday and the triumphant "Hurrah!" of Easter could I imagine living the symbol meant to explain the mysterious wonder of Christ and His church.  Only in walking through the Holy Week and seeing Christ's ultimate life-giving death, could I begin to trust the strange thing that is marriage... the many deaths to self that somehow bring life.  I needed to start my marriage with the hope of Easter glimmering in the near future because only

Waiting  has  had its perks. Our socks are wearing out. It's December and I have no long sleeves. Wearing summer clothes, back when it was still summer. It's time to mail out Christmas cards and I have no return address. Wearing summer clothes when it is NOT still summer with a borrowed jacket (and shoe). These are not complaints. These are matter-of-fact observations about our life right now. Way back in June, we threw the bulk of our belongings in a Pod, with the certain assumption that in a month or two we'd meet up again with our plentiful closets and favorite toys. So surely, we only needed a week's supply of summer clothing to see us through. Leaving the parking lot after waving goodbye to our Pod. Notice, we didn't even have enough stuff to completely block our windows. But it's been a lot longer than a month or two. The seasons have changed. The toddler has outgrown both pairs of shoes we brought along for him.  And me, we

The first time I walked into apartment 502K, I sat on the floor and cried. I had many reasons for those tears, among them the hormones of being eight months pregnant and finishing up two months of living out of a suitcase. But 502K provided plenty more. Dorms are a special college experience, but not quite so glamorous for a young family, and 502K screamed dorm living from every inch of its 660-ish square feet. For months I tried to beat the institutional construction into a more homelike existence, and it seemed I met frustration at every turn. I'd measure shelving then go out to purchase organizers only to have to return them when I discovered that the size of the shelf was not uniform across it's length and so didn't fit... or maybe it would have fit, if there hadn't been a totally awkward door frame around the closet or if the bathroom door didn't make it impossible to have a bath rug in the bathroom or if the cupboards had been large enough to keep dinn

Perhaps one of my first introductions to the loneliness of stuff left behind was from the computer game Oregon Trail. In the long ago days of fifth and sixth grade, I would walk into the only air conditioned room I ever had reason to visit, rub my arms against the goosebumps and try not to lean backwards in the plastic lawn chairs, waiting for the computers to turn on and the game to start. In the computer lab. Notice my fashionable mismatched socks and my "white" Keds. Oregon Trail was a window for learning. About computers, yes, but also about diseases I didn't know how to pronounce, geography that I somehow assumed mostly to be fictional, and the oddity of leaving home for an unknown future. (Never mind the irony that I was living the same story, the child of international missionaries.) But back to Oregon Trail. My memory is too vague to remember whether the crude pixelated images showed items abandoned on the side of the road, but in the years since, I ha

God has a sense of humor. Do you suffer from any doubts? Today, delivered by UPS, I received two rocks in the mail. Genuine stone from a riverbed in Iowa. It seems that I was in need of a Stone of Help , so God sent me two in the mail. I'm not mystical enough to have you believe it was Heaven as the return address. No, the return address was the very earthly place of Carol Stream, Illinois: the publishing house for the Bible I contributed a dozen essays to. The very Bible I was reading through when the rocks were delivered. The very Bible I was reading to try and encourage my spirit in the midst of a wee bit of overwhelm regarding my current writing project and its fast approaching deadline. Sometimes God encourages His people through His Word recorded generations ago, and sometimes He encourages His people through the gift of two stone tablets. Of course, my two stone tablets are rather different than the ones He gave His people on Mount Sinai. But they are engra