It's a late summer day, the air is sweltering, silent, still -- but you take your almost-one-year-old puppy for a walk anyway, for she is a tad stir-crazy due to the rain. Nothing much happens on your walk. You're a little bored. Blah, blah, blah, just another day. Yet, when you walk back up your […]

Hope sits in my kitchen; a sturdy farm table, confident that even with all her dings, dents and defects, joy might get served for breakfast. Laughable? Yes. Yet when loneliness fills my bowl, when uncertainty cascades into my cobalt blue cup, when life serves dashed dreams on my best dishes, I pull up a chair, […]

If you know me, you know I love to laugh. I love to be around people who make me laugh, and I love to be the one who makes other people laugh. I have always felt a bit sacrilegious about this. I mean, laughter feels like the opposite of what you were supposed to do […]

This is a repost from last summer! For my early morning swimming//pool-walking fools! *** For mid-July, it was a cold morning. Gray clouds hovered over the pool and the summer breeze was brisk and chilly. And yet we gathered to swim. All shapes and sizes, ages and demographics. Some obviously athletic, others barely able to […]

It is amazing to me how Jesus is being used to justify the exact behaviors he preached so vociferously against. The one who declared that loving our neighbors as ourselves is God's very heartbeat is being used to justify hatred of the most vulnerable. The one who pushed the religious elite of his day to […]

We were at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota last week for a physical tune-up of sorts. In the middle of the marble-floored, high-ceilinged, main lobby area a pianist dressed in scrubs was playing her heart out. The simple melody floated through the open space. We stopped, grateful for a break from tests and appointments, […]