Trying Softer
I made a halfhearted plan to knock on our neighbor’s door, but when the time came, something more urgent arose, and I decided I’d visit tomorrow. Urgent things came up the next day and the next. Before I knew it, cars overflowed from this neighbor’s driveway into the street. I had waited too long.
Celebrating in the Midst
We must approach celebration as a spiritual discipline, a rebellious act of worship we practice on the good days, the hard days, and the ordinary days. When we’ve spent time earnestly rehearsing a spiritual response, it becomes a part of who we truly are. With the ingrained discipline of sacred celebration, we can live and respond from a place of truth, rather than a place of regret or despair.
Community & Commitment
Christ-like community is neither incidental nor accidental. It requires the intentional surrender of our time, money, comfort, and emotional energy in the interest of contributing to the healing of our neighbors and, ultimately, the healing of the world.
And You Will Be Blessed
I’ve had to wonder—in what way is it a blessing to welcome people who are poor and needy? In what way is it a blessing to associate with the dispossessed and identify with the ones who most people see in terms of “can’t do,” the ones who can’t walk or can’t talk or can’t see or can’t move quickly? In what way could it be a blessing to show hospitality to people who can’t?
Calling & Limitations
Limitations don’t have to be losses; they can be the avenues to our flourishing. This is particularly true if we stay focused and creative within their boundaries, if we care for and cherish what’s inside them.
My Body Is Not A Prayer Request
If we believe that disabled people are not whole until they cross an enchanted threshold into the afterlife, that will certainly impact the way we engage with them in the here and now. We talk about God’s kingdom as the now and not yet: the in-between space that we get glimpses of but are not fully a part of yet. Treating disabled people as image-bearers only once we get to the “not yet” impacts the now.
Detours
I imagine most of us have fairly straightforward pictures in our heads about what our lives will look like and who we will become. When something happens that is not inside the four corners of that picture, we view it as a detour and hope to get back on track as quickly as possible. So what happens when you take a detour and can't ever get back on that original path again?
A Picture of Grace in Italy
The world I will roll into tomorrow deserves to see the light of the world shining in the darkness and the works of God displayed through a life disabled but one gloriously enabled by grace.
Sacred Tears
Yes friend, the Lord has purpose you for. There may not be healing on this earth but there will be fruit. There is a deep longing in each to understand who we are and why we exist, and, for some of us, our suffering is the very vehicle to this understanding. Your purpose will look different than mine, but it will absolutely impact other people because God created us first for himself and then for each other.
God’s Word as a Catalyst for Community
Within the pages of the Bible, God has given us the full history of His promise to humanity: to rescue us from death and infuse us with life. Despite its density, we need to read it …and read it regularly.
I’ve always wondered, “If this is the source text for my worldview, why do I barely review it on my own?”
How to Wait
I became a master at what I dubbed monotasking, born mostly out of an effort not to die of boredom while enduring a hospital stay during COVID times. I made a conscious effort to do only one task at a time, no matter its simplicity. But when I found that I could do more—walk and talk, eat and listen—I found that I didn’t want to. I enjoyed focusing all my efforts on one task at a time. Maybe this is how we are meant to live—a meditative life.
Good/Hard Living
Whether it’s the sand of Lake Michigan, the joy of the first snow, a bout of sadness, or another broken down appliance, we’ll hold all the tension, grief, and sorrow of these rough years, and we’ll look for the good. We’ll look back and acknowledge: yes, that was hard, but it was good, too. We see it in the eyes of one another and the fact that the sorrow itself points to a good that was lost.
Between the Advents
We often forget that four hundred long, tumultuous years are compressed into the single page that bifurcates our holy scriptures into an old and new testament. Within the infinity of that blank page, God’s people waited and waited and waited in the deafening silence and weighty absence of prophetic words or divine appearances. I can only imagine how their once-helpful hope became heavy and burdensome, rather than buoying, as their faith faded in the long-expected Messiah.
Life in the After
I like the word straining. It implies that looking ahead is not easy; it takes effort. We usually think of strain in relation to pain. And maybe that is what Paul is implying: looking ahead is hard, requiring effort and maybe discomfort. But we must strain forward to what lies ahead, though it may feel better to look back.
The First in a Litany of Insecurities
For 15 years I take note of possible imperfections before anyone can see, question, or mock. I hide the litany of physical insecurities growing with age. The goal is to prevent harm from people, yet the self-contempt within becomes its own poison.
Suffering With
Suffering—on an individual level and at a global scale—unveils a profound opportunity for us the church to make the invisible God visible to one another. When we choose to reframe suffering as a universalizing means of connection rather than a point of isolation, everything changes
A Good and Perfect Gift
Before Penny was born, I would have assumed that an extra chromosome was just that, a crack in the cosmos, evidence of the fractured nature of all creation. But how could I imagine such a thing about my daughter? I couldn’t figure it out.
Maybe They’ve Never Seen Someone Without Feet
At just ten years old, Jude offered the antidote to shame to a crowd of four hundred misty-eyed people, most of whom were older than he and many of whom have typical bodies. Through the unexpected teacher of pain, Jude has learned what most of us will never fully understand: we were all made in the image of God, and we don’t have to be ashamed.
Just Put a Band-aid on It: How Wounds Heal
What if our corporate bodies were oriented to healing the way our physical bodies are? Christians call ourselves the body of Christ. That term is a collective one—literally, a corporate one—encompassing all of us in a mysterious unbreakable bond of unity in diversity. And so we may draw on the analogy between the human body’s natural wound-healing system and the ways we can mirror those processes as we strive to heal communal wounds, whether in the church, the family, the workplace, or the wider community.
People Before Things
I value creating a beautiful home for my family, but I’ll never be able to hold an appreciation for beautiful surroundings too dearly. So many of our things are broken now. Look in any direction in our house and you’ll find evidence of a non-preferred task or a sensory meltdown or a time when we said “No,” before we knew what reaction that word could elicit.