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Coming to the end of a rich novel that accidentally changes your heart is like coming to the end of a part of your life that was good and beautiful and godly. It feels wrong to have good things end. Surely Eden starts right here and only continues until and through...

We all have unspoken fantasies about how we'll live out our dreams, our calling … or our Easter celebration with our family. We don't name them, but they take up space in our minds. They have a power of sorts. I wonder if the first day of school, the last day of...

When I was sixteen and a new believer, my eyes were always open for a miracle. I hadn’t looked for God over much of my life … and then, one day, I did. Then, looking became a part of my life. One of my friends told me how, as he wrestled with discovering if God was...

The phrase your dad or your coach told you when you were seven and standing on the side of the swimming pool on that 65-degree June morning during the first week of summer swim practice still plays in your head, doesn't it? Winners never quit, and quitters never win....

I’m old enough to remember when people didn’t come up with “a word for their year.” I remember a few writers deciding to name their year with a word, a decade and a half ago, and the rest of us in the Christian world followed suit. (Am I correct on that timing?...

Several days in, this new year has felt less like the turning of a page and more like a run-on sentence. Shouldn’t there be a period somewhere in here? I’d like to demarcate an ending and declare a new beginning, but only the calendar tells me it’s so. It feels a bit...

I've never been full of memory. I only have two dozen or so memories of my dad — one of the most influential people in my life, both before and after he died — all of which cycle through my mind as sounds and smells bring me back to girlhood. In one memory, we sat on...

When I was 27, and God said “no” through an empty womb, I had more life ahead of me than behind me—more dreams on the horizon than stories lived in grit (where dreams meet the road). Everything felt like possibility — every new friendship, every neighbor that moved...

I still remember where we were sitting on our olive green Craig’s-List-purchased couch (remember Craig’s List?) when she said to me, “I want a friend that is just like me. None of my friends are like me.” She was eight, so I poked and discovered that “just like me”...

Just as I have difficulty eating peaches in January or squash in June, I wish I could put these posts into categories so you can decide if it's your right season to consume it. If I could, this one would be in the “for those walking through a hard and unrelenting...