I am a gardening wannabe. It’s the artistic part that appeals to me. Loading my Home Depot cart with pretty plants. Then arranging them around the garden, according to size and color and shape and texture and blooming time. However—and quite unfortunately—the science side of gardening eludes me. Oh, sure, I can place the plants… Read More To Grow Your Soul
Truth be told…I didn’t want to write this essay. Oh, I know. List-y essays are all the rage. That’s partly why I balked. The non-conformist in me. But, too, it feels reductionist. Because in listing out these 20 points, I am communicating—in an over-simplified sort of way—several of the ideas that I will be unpacking… Read More 20 Things I Might Have Told My 20-Something Self
When Peter and I purchased This Old McHenry House in 2005, we did what most wise home buyers do. We hired a home inspector to go over the place with a fine-tooth comb and tell us what needed to be fixed. The garage door didn’t close properly. The brick patio was crumbling. Among other things.… Read More Home Inspection (or What We Knew at 22)
When we first saw This Old McHenry House in December of 2004, she was covered in a dingy white vinyl siding. All of her still-visible trim work was sloppily painted a horrible dark pink. She wasn’t pretty. But I thought she had potential. My suspicion was confirmed when we received a folder of paperwork at… Read More Growing Up in Good Time
I grew up in a Fundamental Baptist world. Fundamental Baptist home. Fundamental Baptist church. Fundamental Baptist school. I know what you’re thinking. Okay, actually, I don’t. But I imagine a handful of common responses. Defensiveness is one. Maybe you know some Fundamentalists, and they get your back up. Or maybe you are one, and you… Read More The Fundamentalism Factor
This month I’m taking a break from my This Odd House writing project. Instead, I’m sharing a few little Christmas-related stories, linked up to “Tuesdays Unwrapped” at Emily Freeman‘s chattingatthesky.com. Go to her website to find the links to many more tales of Grace from her community. My plan is to pick back up on… Read More Our Cock-Eyed Christmas
“He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions.”… Read More In the Face of Danger
In my next post I will return to the subject at hand…revealing more about this particular journey of healing that God has taken me on. But here I want to take a step back—for my own benefit as much as anything—and try to explain the point of this exercise. Why I feel the need to… Read More The Big Reveal
“Few experiences in life are as deep as the feelings we carry about our mothers.” (Jasmin Lee Cori, The Emotionally Absent Mother) We tumble into this world, itty bundles with awfully high expectations. Every last one of us. And for many years, most of those expectations are aimed at one well-intentioned, yet blessedly fallible, person—the… Read More On Mom: Our Secure Foundation
I love old homes. I have been drawn to them for as long as I can remember. When I was perhaps eight years old, I fell in love with a towering, yellow Victorian mansion set high on a hill on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My childhood plan was to live there with my handsome… Read More Why This Title? Part 1