The Holy Lack

This year I read Perelandra during Holy Week. It wasn’t on purpose, I swear. I just happened to say “hm, I should read that again,” right about the same time as Palm Sunday. But as is the way with me and books, I saw something new this time. Oddly, it had less to […]

Bloom

I used to hate change.

We get so caught up in the way things are now, the state that we live in and our circumstances. Sometimes it’s so wonderful that we don’t want a thing to change, and sometimes it’s so difficult that we despair of relief. And sometimes it’s a […]

Put it down

I’ve been mulling for the past week something that Elisabeth Elliot says in Passion and Purity, about how we need to lay down everything that is ours in surrender to God. Everything. A lot of people talk about laying things down and surrendering them, but most of the time we think of it […]

In Defense of the Small

Yesterday, a friend of mine (she knows who she is) told me that she and her husband are officially “old” because they got a humidifier for Christmas. (And were happy about it.) And I said, “Oh, come on. You know how excited I was about my flannel sheets, right?” It’s like we’ve got […]

Unwrapped

“Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s been enslaved?”

The worst trap is the one you don’t realize you’re in.

It’s a strange truth of my psyche that I realize I’ve fallen in a rut because everything starts getting on my nerves. It’s like a detector […]

Give it away

I like baking. I like the food that I bake, and I like the way my house smells when I’ve baked. But given that there are only two of us living here, we have a dilemma: what do I do with my baked goods?

Give them away, of course.

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Doing the route

Back when I was a kid, I had a paper route. It wasn’t very large: seventy-some houses, fifty-five of which got the newspaper daily, all in our immediate neighborhood. Unusually for many jobs, there were no days off. Though the route took less than two hours on a bad day to get done, […]

Fixing things

It is the occupational hazard of being a naturally law-abiding person and growing up in a functional, spiritually grounded home that I should find it easy to underestimate things like grace. And to find it difficult to believe that wrongs can be transformed or that whatever I have gotten myself into, God is […]