2020
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Pivot
We are almost to the one-year anniversary of the time when everything changed. And there’s not a date we can look to, specifically, but there is a feeling we can name when we increasingly understood that something big was happening at this time last year. Maybe it was when you or your dear ones had to…
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Mantle – 2021
Each year between Christmas and New Year’s, I lean in close to discover my word for the year ahead. Last year a scripture caught hold of me hard and I thought for sure that my word was embedded within it. It was Isaiah 43:19, and I scribbled it on an index card and affixed it to…
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Puddles
I was praying for a particular person recently and felt an image of a bucket of light being poured out at their feet like paint from a can. The light spread like paint, slowly, into a puddle and it was just enough to step in, just enough to give direction but not nearly enough for a…
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Encounter
My devotional sent me to the book of 1Kings this morning, to the story about Elijah the prophet who, running for his life, fell exhausted and prayed for death. The story leads to one of the most recognizable passages in scripture, about how Elijah retreated to a cave, and experienced first a great and powerful wind…
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More
Hey there, Catholic friend, I see you. You were brought up with CCD and necco wafer communion and mass. You gave up candy for Lent, ate fish sticks on Fridays, and know the meaning of a Holy Day of Obligation (get thyself to church). Your grandmother or some other sweet church lady used to pray the rosary…
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Way
Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. ~Isaiah 43:18-19 I’d be surprised if there’s a soul reading these words who doesn’t feel we’re…
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Hope
On December 31, 2019, I had a lot of hopes. At our sweet friends’ New Year’s Eve party, I shakily wrote my resolution on a thin piece of cardboard: ‘attend my first writer’s conference’ and then I paused and added something like, ‘pursue publishing’. In the weeks that followed, I applied for and received a…
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Walk – 2020
For the past several years on New Year’s Eve, our sweet hosts have pulled out a sheet of cardboard on which everyone writes their goals for the year ahead in permanent sharpie. One year I wrote that I would find our dog, Bailey, and I did. Another year I wrote that I would run a…