friendship
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Four Words
One of my favorite authors featured a short video on her Instagram last week and I cannot stop thinking about it. In an interview, Kate Bowler speaks about her initial steps into the bewildering and scary journey of stage four cancer and she highlights an interaction with one of her nurses, Meg. At the time,…
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Listen
I’ve been having the hardest time hearing God in prayer, and so today, I asked some friends to listen for me. What they said changed everything. For the longest time, I had what felt like a pretty clear channel between me and God. I said all-the-things and sometimes I heard back with images, words, or…
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Move
On our street, we bring treats to new neighbors. I remember thirteen years ago, walking with my then six-year old daughter a few doors down to leave a wrapped banana bread on a covered porch in the rain. We couldn’t have known then that our new neighbors would become our dear friends, couldn’t have guessed…
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Keeper
As I settled into my seat at the annual gratitude mass for a large area charity, I shook my head in wonder. There were hundreds of people at the mass, and it had taken us quite a while to sit, there were so many people to hug. We’ve been a part of this place since…
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Rain
I had a great plan to celebrate my husband’s fiftieth birthday. He’s an outdoors kind of guy, and I love a metaphor, so the plan came together quickly. Go for a hike symbolic of life-so-far with the family in a nearby park, have friends surprise him on the path at various points, finish the day…
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New
I’ve had some fun New Year’s Eves. When I was a kid, our parents would pre-order Chinese food for our dinner, and I remember with fondness the sticky red-sauced pork and fried rice we ate just once a year. In later years, I remember a fun NYE in a friend’s apartment with super-loud music and…
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Tribe
Binary thinking. We see it played out today in our culture, our politics, and on our television screens. It’s black and white, hot and cold, with us or against us. As I get older, I see the danger of this kind of thinking. For one, it’s inflexible and betrays a kind of arrogance, but also,…
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Glass
I have to buy a new blender. My old one was a wedding shower gift, old and tired, and it worked fine for years, but it’s showing signs that it’s on the way out. It even has a crack in it that’s held together by duct tape, believe it or not. Since I depend on…
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Click
Once I travelled south to New York City with my daughter for the day to see a show and go back home again. On the same day, another woman travelled north with her son to see the same show. We sat a row apart and did not meet. She reads Shauna Niequist, loves her family…
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Soul
I was crossing the line from sleep to waking and was already making lists in my head. Post office, laundry, papers, mess, dishes…things I needed to get done to make way for the things I wanted to do, like meet an old friend for lunch. Before I even got out of bed, I felt…