It hardly ever happens that I walk out of a movie theater after viewing a film and want to turn right back around and see the same film once again. Yesterday evening was one of those rare occurrences. I experienced such a strong desire to make a 180 degree turn back into the movie theater. […]
It’s now two days since Temma’s “big birthday bash”. It was a wonder! Close to sixty-five friends, neighbors, and family came out to celebrate Temma’s forty years of life, and many others who wanted to be there but could not make it. I have a little more time to reflect now than I did in […]
“What are they?” I whispered to myself as I walked down the side path to the lake in Busse Woods in order to get a closer look. They were birds lying, folded in, like lumps of white. Every once in a while I could catch a glimpse of black when one of the lumps would […]
“If you stare at a painting long enough, you begin to see things you never saw before,” Tim says. We’re standing before the painting The Lamentation of Christ, by Rogier Van Der Weyden that hangs in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy. With an open drawing notebook in one hand and a pencil in the […]
This morning I heard a sermon on Patience, one in a series on the Fruits Of the Spirit. It was a good sermon with good worship. Recently, when I’ve been asked by friends, “How can I pray for you?” I’ve responded with one word, patience. When a trusted, longtime friend and I made our yearly […]
Elena Ferrante, the Italian author of My Beautiful Friend, has a book of four essays out titled, In The Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. These are deeply thought out and intimately written essays about some of the influences on her disciplines of reading and writing. She writes about finding her own voice […]
Some articles have been appearing lately about an alarming number of teenagers and especially teenage girls who are in despair, struggling to hang on to living. (This has long been true of LGBTQ+ teens. Statistics now showing a dramatic rise in distress and suicidal ideation in teen girls specifically). It’s not news. People have been […]
Growing up in Michigan is a story of winter, at least in my memory. The harshness of winter when things cannot grow in the ground and the fun of winter tobogganing at the golf course hill, snowboarding on the small hill in our backyard, sledding, snowball fights, and walking out on the big ice waves […]
My mom is beautiful. She just turned ninety-three-years old. I don’t know if she ever really yearned to be a mother—especially of five children. I’ve not asked her that question. Or was it the only alternative to a woman of her generation, married young with an eight-grade education? Her own mother died when she was […]
A few days ago I finished reading our friend Riva Lehrer’s new memoir, Golem Girl. I closed the back cover of this most beautiful book and felt so full of wonder, joy, spirit, and hope that I wanted to get down on my knees and pray and then get up and dance and sing. It’s […]
Writing From the Margins 