life

  • Theology of the Red Pants

    Whenever my mother took me clothes shopping as an adult, for my birthday or Christmas, she’d watch me head straight for the neutrals and slowly shake her head.  She lifted up the versions of the sweater or the jacket that I had picked, but these were red, purple, yellow, or green and she’d implore me to just…

  • When

    When

    Someone posed this question at my daughter’s post-high school graduation dinner: If given the choice, would you rather know HOW you were going to die or WHEN you were going to die? Now, before anyone piles on about the appropriateness of the timing of this particularly morbid question at that particularly hopeful event, you should…

  • Pass

    Pass

    My youngest child has just a handful of days left of high school, and I’m finding my reaction to her big milestone quite different from when we walked this road with our son just two years ago. Then, I was in mourning, pulling in every “last” and wringing my hands over how everything was about…

  • Chutes

    I’ve never been very good at chess. For the same reason I require Google maps to get to places I’ve been a million times before, couldn’t visualize my renovated kitchen until the day it was done, and lost any mastery of math after algebra 2, it’s just not my natural skill set: I can’t see…

  • Down

    It used to be that on a grumpy, grumbly day, I would see my whole life through the lens of whatever was currently happening to cause my ill-ease. I would build a monument to it with my thoughts, and the walls of it were so thick that no light could come in. We all experience…

  • Rules

    I went grocery shopping at the worst possible time. It was Saturday, and the day before the Super Bowl, and it was as crowded as you might imagine, but I thought I could get in and out with my short list. I was wrong. The aisles were crammed full of people and carts and the…