Day 17: Thank
It was summer in South Haven, MI. Life was full of fresh blueberries, Kilwin’s ice cream, and white pizza from Venezia brought down to the beach to watch the sunset, but I couldn’t taste any of it. A conflict was escalating…
Day 16: We Need You to be Fully You
Her heart squeezed tight as she stepped out of the silver Honda after the six hour drive. She stretched her legs and willed her heart to stretch too, but felt the familiar anxiety pinch it tight. She was a newlywed…
Day 15: Rebuild
Like the walls of Jerusalem in Nehemiah’s time, our lives after a move are in various states of disrepair. We can’t figure out how all the rocks fit into our new schedules and so everything feels a bit haphazard, chaotic. We’re catching meals…
Day 14: Sabbath Beauty Hunt
“We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it,…
Day 13: Lamenting or How to Give our Negative Emotions to God
Three weeks ago I looked across to Andrew reading in bed and wondered out loud when we would be allowed to go home. I was done with this moving thing. Our neighborhood pool had just closed for the autumn, he was beginning to travel again,…
Day 12: Get Real
When you packed up that UHaul you carried more than just your tan couch up the ramp, you brought along other baggage too: grief, anxiety, anger, and possibly fear. Moving changes everything. Psychologists say it can disturb the deepest foundations underneath your identity.…
Day 10: Embrace Solitude
Wide open, unfilled spaces can be utterly freeing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh in A Gift by the Sea rolled up the rugs in her “shell of a beach house” to encourage visual simplicity, a way of embracing the quiet. With this move, your schedule has…
Day 9: Play
Moving is hard, slogging work: new relationships, new rules, new horizons, and the daily mixture of grief and joy. You have been hard at work, my friend. Today toss “have to” aside and travel on over to the side of…
Day 8: Glory
I love glancing up from my laptop at Starbucks and watching those stamped with God’s image parade to their lattes. Original, God-created, glorious creatures. Each one holds stories that would make you weep. They work hard making their way in the world…
Day 7: Whisper
“Enlarge my heart for this people.” It’s the kind of prayer-seed the Lord loves to water. And we have to start with seed, don’t we? We must begin with the tight humble seeds pushed into the ground in order to unwrap, to…