Kara Tippetts, a wife and young mother, died recently. I didn’t know her. Like many, though, I feel as if I did–from the words she shared in her book, on her blog and in her radio interviews. Tippetts, 38, was a warrior. She lost a battle with
Read more →Six weeks before my brother died, I had a dream. The ultra-realistic sort, where you stir swearing it happened. I’d gone to visit my sister, Lisa, in Texas. Her house had morphed into what looked like my grandmother’s old home in Ohio–a blurring of lines characteristic of
Read more →On Sept. 11, 2001 I lived in Arlington, Va., a few miles from the Pentagon. When terrorists slammed a jetliner into the famed fortress, I was riding the subway to work, temporarily unaware that my city and my country were under attack. At work I huddled with
Read more →Amanda* is dying from breast cancer. In her early 40s with several young children, she recently told her husband that after she’s gone, she’d like him to remarry. Cancer drugs have sustained her life but stolen her hair. She takes them now to prevent her softening bones
Read more →My son turns 4 years old today. So do I. Noah’s birth was my rebirth. I awakened to the glorious, to the awful. To the sweeping power of a God who saves, redeems, loves. For awhile I mourned the death of my old self. Had life gone
Read more →Generation X is sometimes dubbed ‘The Divorce Generation.’ We were children of an era plagued by divorce. A new report on divorce’s impact on faith says Gen X children of divorce “form a kind of broken leading edge, with spiritual stories quite often characterized by loss or
Read more →One of my goals for the new year is to read more e-books. Not just books–stacks of them line my desk, nightstand, bathroom. I even borrow my children’s library books. Bedtime stories are balm to a mother’s day-worn soul. Holding books, seeing and smelling them; this is
Read more →Mom had more faith than anyone I’ve met. Unshakable faith in Christ, really. I was reminded of that recently, as I rifled through a box of nearly forgotten items from my childhood. I landed on an autograph book, a gift for my tenth birthday. Among the few
Read more →Summer was in full-and-glorious bloom when last I wrote here. So was my belly, nearly 40 weeks full of my darling daughter. Nine days later, I gave birth. I settled into a self-imposed hiatus from writing, and suddenly it’s winter. Or so the calendar says. Most of North
Read more →Last week I toured the suburban Chicago hospital where my daughter will be born. It would be a breeze, I thought, approaching the tour as if I were on a fact-finding mission. First, examine the layouts of the labor and delivery and recovery areas, and then ask
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